


That night.

by DictionaryWrites



Series: J/W Fics [2]
Category: Jeeves & Wooster
Genre: Celibacy, Class Differences, Complicated Relationships, Depression, Desperation, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotionally Repressed, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Internalized Homophobia, Masturbation, Men Crying, Mental Health Issues, Mutual Pining, Non-Sexual Intimacy, POV Bertram "Bertie" Wooster, POV Jeeves, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-Relationship, Self-Esteem Issues, Self-Hatred, Slow Burn, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2019-10-27 01:10:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17756948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DictionaryWrites/pseuds/DictionaryWrites
Summary: Bertram Wooster has a secret unspeakable.“Even if she was— I’m talking about a goddess, Jeeves, gearing up to marry the old Wooster corpus to her in matrimony, and— And pleasant, and kind, and… And thoughtful, and what-not, not aunt-like at all in her demeanour, the perfect woman, no flaws whatsoever, and I wouldn’t want to marry her, and you’d help me out of it?”“Yes, sir,” I say. “If you are affianced against your will, it is my duty, I feel, to remove you from the case.”“And never be married?” he asks.“Not if you do not wish to be married, sir,” I say evenly.“Oh,” he says. “And you’re not going to… You’re not going to, er, ask why?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't tagged because I didn't want anyone to think the character death was Jeeves or Bertie, but just a warning, there's discussion of Bertie's parents' death in a car crash that might be a bit upsetting, as well as the suicidal discussion, which is at length. I promise, there will be hope later in the fic!

I stir in my bed at some unusual hour. It is past midnight, I am aware, but I am not of the sort to be disturbed from my repose for no reason: I ordinarily sleep soundly through the night, on those where all is well. Catching in my unconscious, I have no doubt sensed some strangeness in the flat, perhaps heard some quiet or unusual noise. These are not, in themselves, unusual: Mr Wooster often returns from the Drones Club at ungodly hours, and although I do not usually rise to meet him if I am already abed, I prefer to be awake, lest he fall and hurt himself in the process of undressing.

Of course, Mr Wooster has not been to the Drones Club tonight. I put him to bed with one of his novels at a little past ten o’clock.

I stand, drawing on my slippers, and I catch hold of my dressing gown, which is a dark grey, and draw it on over my pyjamas, which are striped in a navy blue. I prefer muted colours, particularly in my bedclothes. It is very rare that I should walk from my bedroom undressed in this manner, only on the mornings where I bathe before Mr Wooster rises from his bed, and I feel distinctly unclad as I step with silent grace down the vestibule, coming into the main living area.

The chain still rests upon the door, which is neatly locked; the windows are closed, as they had been; no light is lit. For a moment, I stand completely still, my hand wrapped loosely around the cosh in my dressing gown pocket, and just as I am resolving to turn upon my heel and check into the room of the young master, I hear the shift.

It is a small noise. Naught but the shift of a body on the carpet, and immediately, I look to the edge of the long sofa.

Stepping slowly forward, making out little in the scant moonlight that filters in from behind the blind, I make out the figure—

“Oh, sorry, old thing,” Mr Wooster says softly. In the darkness, I can only make out the shimmer of light catching his hair, and the strange silhouette of his face in profile, affecting him with a ghostly countenance that I find myself unable to look directly upon. “Did I wake you?”

He is seated on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, his knees drawn up toward his body, in line with his head, and from what I can make out in the little illumination available to me, he is clad only in his pyjamas, his bare feet pale in the light. He’ll catch his death, I think, if I leave him out here.

“Sir,” I say, “are you quite well?” He had not been abroad the night previous, and I had put him to bed with one of his absurd novels some hours ago: it is not his nature, as a rule, to wander the flat in the twilight hours.

“Hm? Oh, yes, yes, fine, what. Leave me to it, Jeeves, I’ll be right as rain in a moment or so.”

“Sir—”

“I said _leave me_ , Jeeves,” he says, his voice abruptly so sharp and so brittle it scarcely seems that it might truly be his. I feel myself stiffen, my shoulders squaring as I look down at the figure of my master in the dark, my jaw set. It is not often that Mr Wooster raises his voice to me, and certainly, he never does so before I have provoked him first. This show of temper sets a spark beneath my own, and I take a step forward.

“Have you imbibed, sir?” I ask, more stiffly – and far more directly, I might add – than I ordinarily would. The hardness of my voice serves as a blade, and I see him flinch slightly in the dark, for I have cut.

“ _No_ , Jeeves,” Mr Wooster says. “ _Push off_ , would you?” he snaps at me, with such rancour I find myself astounded, his voice cracking with his rage. “If a man wants to sit in his own living room, he shall do so at any hour he likes, regardless of—”

I flick on the light, and he goes still, his tongue ceasing. He doesn’t look at me. His gaze remains fixed on some point in the middle distance, his cupids bow lips pressed fast together, his gaze hard.

His cheeks are wet, I see. His eyes are rimmed with red.

My initial emotion is irritation, that he should summon me from bed, crying like a schoolboy, with no proper regard for his station, with no _thought_. My second emotion, distant, but undeniably present, is the scarcest hint of guilt, and a pang that serves to ring in the empty cage about my heart, for Mr Wooster did _not_ summon me. He had crept so silently from his room, in fact, that I had not heard him in the corridor, likely in order that he might cry here, alone, where there was less danger of my hearing him.

He shudders out an exhalation, and I watch powerlessly, my training failing me as to how to respond, what to do, as he interlinks his fingers and puts them either side of his head, hiding his head between his knees as if bracing himself for a crash.

“Go away, Jeeves,” he says petulantly, his voice muffled. “Leave me be.”

“I think you ought back to your bed, sir,” I reply.

“I don’t want you— _looking_ at me, Jeeves. Always so… Always with the judiciary eye, what? Makes a man feel like he’s two feet tall. I should rather be alone, if it’s all the same to you.” This wounds me. Perhaps it ought not: I am aware of the effect my gaze can have upon him, because I have taken care to affect it with weight and ire in the past, but not now. Not now. Here, I am merely his valet, looking at him with as best a mask as I can make on my face, and yet this alone, he says, hurts him. My very _presence_.

“It is not, sir,” I say, not allowing my defiance seep into my voice, although it burns as a fire in my belly. I hear him choke, and then he lets out a noise that is undeniably a sob.

“Oh, _dash_ it, Jeeves,” he snaps, and he grabs at a cushion from the sofa, but his toss of the item is quite ineffectual: I catch it, and he bursts into tears. I stand stock still, holding the soft pillow between my palms as I watch him cry. It is a pitiful noise, hiccoughing and stuttering, and it occurs to me that despite his long limbs, his lanky form, that in this moment, he seems to me to be very small indeed.

Men of Mr Wooster’s age are meant to have grown out of such displays of ridiculous upset as this. I have thought of Mr Wooster as childish before, but here, he strikes me as quite infantile, and I hear him heave in a gasp. “Oh, get _out_ , Jeeves,” he almost shouts, and he looks at me. His blue eyes, wet as they are, the skin about them puffy and red with his exertions, seem lit from within by a white fire.

“No, sir,” I say, and he stands to his feet, coming toward me, his fists clenched at his sides. Even in the movement, however, I know he would never hit me: it is not in his nature, as it is in my own, to strike out in his temper, and I know him to cringe readily away from causing harm to others, no matter how justified he might be.

“Am I not your employer?” he asks in a dreadful hiss. The tears fall freely from his eyes, running down his cheeks.

“Yes, sir.”

“Will you not _ever_ do what I say?” he demands, so desperately I fear he may bowl himself over with the effort of his speech. “Must you be such an _insufferable_ —” He stops himself, catching the words before they might run from his tongue, and I stare down at him. His lip, usually lovely and softly pink, is quivering. He reaches up, rubbing hard at one of his eyes with his sleeve. It is the first attempt he has made to actually _hide_ the tears on his face, and the are still falling readily. “You aren’t insufferable, Jeeves,” he says quietly, and I can see the cast of regret in his handsome features, even through the veil of tears.

I am torn between emotion. I want to clip him hard upside the ear, and my father’s words ring distantly in my head. _I’ll give you something to cry about_ —

I wish, in the same bare moment, that I might break the unspoken line of propriety that separates my person from Mr Wooster’s, that I might reach out and gently touch his shoulder, that I might give him that comfort, allow him to sob out his heart, if he will only do so upon my breast.

I wish I could kiss him.

The thought cuts me to my very core, makes my every organ recoil beneath my flesh, and I am suspended as if in ice water, my gaze upon the young master’s face.

“Thank you, sir,” I say. I say it rather stonily, and I see him crumble further, his dismay all but a cowl upon his slumping shoulders.

“I hate the way you look at me, Jeeves,” he says softly. “You do it all the dashed time, you know, you look at me and you think— Oh, I don’t know what you _think_ , but your face seems to say to me, it seems to say, oh, that stupid Wooster, so dim he doesn’t know his left from his right, happy as a clam because he doesn’t _know_ , and I— Dash it, Jeeves, I _do_ know. I know precisely how… I _know_ I don’t live up to your expectations, because I don’t live up to Aunt Dahlia’s or Aunt Agatha’s or the expectations, I’m sure, of any aunt alive, and Lord knows I should never measure up to the expectations of a wife, but I— I’m just so _tired_ , damn it all! I’m so _tired_ , and I can’t get away from any of it, and sometimes I lie there in my bed and think, oh, gosh, I wish I could go home, but I _am_ home, and I haven’t anywhere else to go. Because they’re… Because _I’m_ …”

He seems unsure how to continue, and I watch a tear trail from his left eye down the length of his nose, where it hovered for a moment before falling down. It stains his shirt collar, and my gaze settles on the dark droplet it left on the cloth. I have never heard him speak so bluntly, with such implicit sorrow. You must understand that while my master is prone more than most to one emotion or another, these are always displays of excess, all but cartoonish in their proportion: he compels his every feeling to hyperbole, as if it is to be performed upon a stage and he must make his acted emotion known even to the furthest seats.

This is not excessive in the least. Despite his anger, his irritation, his grief, and even despite the tears on his cheeks, this display strikes me as muted, and it strikes fear into my heart, for I know not what I might do in the face of it.  I have seen masters, in the past, shout and throw their possessions, display violence, but never this. Never this.

I wish he was drunk. Were he drunk, this might be easier, that I might brush off the depth of these emotions. Were he drunk, I might tell him to lie down, tell him… I might _tell_ him. He is always so obedient when he is drunk, and at times, I prefer this to his strikes of wilfulness.

With that said—

He does not disappoint me. Mr Wooster, I am desperate to say, is the best of the employers I have ever had, which is why I am so content in his service. He is not, as other men I have served, cruel or unkind; he is not, as other men I have served, of a criminal lilt, embezzling; he is not greedy or licentious, not violent or salacious. He is a good man, I want to say, but it would be remiss of me to do so: to speak on his moral character without prompt, even to praise it, would be a breach of some etiquette. And as for his _aunts_ , why, had I not assured him before they expected too much of him? Had I not…?

Perhaps I had not.

“Your parents are alive, aren’t they, Jeeves?” he asks. I don’t believe I have ever seen his face look so genuinely despondent. His gaze is focused soundly in the reason of my neck, and not on my face.

“My mother, sir,” I answer. “My father died when I was seventeen.”

“Condolences, Jeeves,” he says softly. “I didn’t know.” He _oughtn’t_ know. It is none of his business, whether my family is alive or dead, whether I speak with any of them. I consider pointing this out to him, pointing out the breach of propriety. He has never spoken on the subject of his own parents before, except in passing. “Horrible car crash,” he says. He says it woodenly, as if he is reading out something he doesn’t much care about from the newspaper. “They say my father died on the impact, but my mother drowned. The bridge went quite out from beneath the car, and her leg was trapped in the— Dashed thing was all crumpled, and they said she must have struggled terribly, trying to get herself free.”

I feel somewhat sick. Mr Wooster is speaking in a dark monotone with which I am not familiar, and he turns his head away from me.

“Can I tell you something, Jeeves, that I’ve never… that I’ve never told anybody?”

My instinct is to refuse. I am unsettled and caught off-guard by my master, sobbing in his nightclothes, and I shudder to think what secrets he might impart upon my person, if I give him the permission. I cannot refuse outright, of course.

“You ought to bed, sir,” I say gently.

“Yes,” he says dolefully. “I suppose.”

And he lets me lead him down the corridor like a tame dog, his eyes downcast to the floor. He is still crying, I notice. Merely that he has stopped sobbing: the tears shine on his cheeks and drip down, one by one. I pull back the bed sheets, and he slides slowly under his bedclothes, but he remains sitting up, back against the headboard.

He looks at me with such plea in his eyes that I almost sway with it.

“You may tell me, sir,” I say, against my better judgement.

“I was going to be in the car.” I look down at him, at his serious expression, his fingers knotted in the bedsheets as if he was trying to make gloves of them. “I was only… I was only a little blighter, eight or so, and it was— It was Bingo’s birthday, you see, and I begged and begged them, that I might stay one day more, and that someone else’s father could bring me back to the metropolis the day after, or put me on the train. It was summer, you see, early summer. And they said… They said alright, Bertie, alright, we’ll see you tomorrow, and then they never did. I always wondered if there were mayflies in the water about the car. Dashed dreadful thing to think about, I’m sure. I never really knew what else to think.”

I busy myself in straightening up one or two untidy aspects of his room, hoping he will lie down.

“Is that why you are so upset, sir?” I ask. “Grief rearing its head?”

“Oh, no, Jeeves,” Mr Wooster says, in a quiet voice. Seriousness does not suit him. That is to say, seriousness suits him very well, lends his every invocation a weight that seems fit to bring me to my knees, and I want to beg him to never speak with such soft gravity ever again, for it wounds me to my core, makes my gut twist and rebel against my body. “No, it isn’t that.”

“Then what?” I ask.

“You were supposed to be asleep,” Mr Wooster says, with a sort of absent accusation. His head tips back against the pillows, and he stares in front of him, not looking at me. “You usually are.”

 _Usually_ , he says. The natural implication being that he has done this before, crept from his bedchamber in the middle of the night to cry his fill on his lonesome, and then crawled back beneath his bedclothes, all while I rested alone in my own. The idea fills me, inexplicably, with a sudden anger. It infuriates me, that he should go to such lengths to deceive me, that I should lie in my bed thinking he was sound asleep, and in fact he was scuttling about the house to sob like a schoolgirl, barefoot and improperly dressed in the chill of the other room. It angers me, I suppose, that he should go to such lengths to avoid my notice.

“Am I a very awful man to you, Jeeves?” he asks. His voice quavers, and when I look at him, I see he has turned his face quite away from mine, as if he is frightened to look at me, and this angers me too. He doesn’t trust me. He doesn’t _trust_ me. After all my years in his service, he doesn’t trust, perhaps, that I won’t lose my temper, or perhaps he thinks I will say some dreadful thing to him. _Me_.

“No, sir,” I say, with more impatience than I mean to, and I see him flinch. My heart breaks. “Mr Wooster, I do not know what has brought about this despondency, but you are a very _kind_ man, and I should prefer, sir, that you know I am very proud to be in your service. You are not _awful_ at all.”

He gulps. I see the apple of his throat bob beneath the column of his neck, but he still doesn’t hurt to look at me. With the door to the hall open, the light from the vestibule creates a golden frame about his face, his body. The tears are beginning to dry, sticky on his wet cheeks.

“I’m sorry, Jeeves,” he mumbles.

“There is no need, sir,” I say. I am aware of the distance between us, him at one end of the room, upon the bed, me here against the corner of the room, amidst the natural barricade of the chest of drawers and the wardrobe on my either side. “I would have awoken anyway.” It is a lie, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or if he does, he doesn’t care.

“I don’t…” He inhales, slowly, raggedly, as if the very motion is a Herculean effort. “I don’t want to get married, Jeeves.”

“Very good, sir,” I say.

“No, _no_ ,” he says sharply, defensively. “No, listen to me, Jeeves, listen to me. Don’t just— Don’t just nod your head at the young master, great fathead that he is, and make your own… Listen to me. Please.”

“I always listen, sir,” I say, with no small amount of reproach.

“You’re a liar, Jeeves,” Mr Wooster retorts. I feel my nostrils flare on my next intake of breath, and I clench my fists tightly at my sides. In the dark, I should hope he cannot see them. “I don’t… I don’t _ever_ want to get married. Do you see? I should rather keep up this bachelor lark forever.”

I consider this for a moment.

When I first joined Mr Wooster’s service, having perused what had been said of him in the book at the Junior Ganymede, I had clear expectations of what my service was entail. The book had described him very accurately indeed: prone to sartorial error and with an unfortunate predilection for popular music, as well as a torrent of friends each more dim and more unkind than the last, Mr Wooster was a simple young man in need of a firm hand. The idea appealed to me: still young, Mr Wooster was ripe to be moulded into a figure more befitting his station, and certainly, I believe I have excelled in that measure, in many ways. I had worked for older gentlemen, more set in their ways, and more inclined to true rebellion where my advice was concerned – although Mr Wooster certainly did at times rebel against my instruction, it never, it seemed to me, resulted as a result of his not respecting my input. Only minutes ago, he had placed me in the same category as his aunts: he considers my authority over him to be quite natural.

This was the main reason my service to him was quite so appealing, at the beginning – Mr Wooster, although prone to his own indiscretions, was promised to be easy to take under one’s command, if one was willing to forgive his flaws. My service to him is a comfortable one: we holiday regularly, the remuneration is most satisfactory, and most of all, Mr Wooster is generous and thoughtful, even in his day-to-day life.

I had always considered, in a distant way, that I was inevitably grooming Mr Wooster for the ideal wife, once she revealed herself. And in this capacity, I had always taken some care: in my time serving Mr Wooster, I have come to like him very much, even noting his misbehaviours, and I should not like to see him unhappily in the arms of a wife who would mistreat him, nor take advantage of his good nature. I myself do not care for serving married men, as I prefer to take on a household in its entirety, and a marriage home is unsuitable for such an endeavour: there are other staff to contend with and to manage, and indeed, a wife who takes away many of one’s duties where the master is concerned. There is, in short, too little control over one’s territory, and I am naturally solitary, when it comes to my work.

“I see, sir,” I say slowly. He has expressed vague notions of this sort before, but I have only ever brushed them off as the aggrandisement of his feeling to which I am accustomed: Mr Wooster is unfortunately prone to hyperbole in one direction, and within a moment, he is pointed toward the other. Now, as I look at his face, take in the hardness of his tone, I sense that – perhaps for the first time – he is being entirely genuine.

“Well?” he says.

“Well, sir?”

“Oh, I know you have something to say about that, Jeeves,” he says scornfully. “Go on, then. Tell me— Tell me, _I can’t advise it, sir_ , or say, _What has provoked this outburst, sir?_ in those soupy tones of yours.”

I stand my ground. “I can’t say I know what you mean, sir,” I say, and I hear him scoff. It’s an ugly noise.

“I don’t want to get married,” he repeats. “Not ever. Not even to the most beautiful lass in the— on the _continent_ , on another continent, on the planet, Jeeves, in the universe, what. You might bring me some beautiful girl from Venus, as pretty as the day is long, with burnished curls and a kind heart and soft lips and what-have-you, and I should still wish for you to fish me out of the soup and get her to marry someone else.”

“Very well, sir,” I assent.

“Really? You’d… You’d do that?” He turns to look at me, and his blue eyes shine with a desperate fervour, as if he is too frightened to be genuinely hopeful.

“Yes, sir,” I say.

“Even if she was— I’m talking about a _goddess_ , Jeeves, gearing up to marry the old Wooster corpus to her in matrimony, and— And pleasant, and kind, and… And thoughtful, and what-not, not aunt-like at all in her demeanour, the perfect woman, no flaws whatsoever, and I wouldn’t want to marry her, and you’d help me out of it?”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “If you are affianced against your will, it is my duty, I feel, to remove you from the case.”

“And never be married?” he asks.

“Not if you do not wish to be married, sir,” I say evenly.

“Oh,” he says. “And you’re not going to… You’re not going to, er, ask why?” I look at him for a long moment. He is looking back at me, but I have to wonder how much of me he can see, as I am swathed in the shadow at this corner of the room: he is twisting the sheet again and again about his hands, and he is worrying his lip.

I had once described Mr Wooster as one of the Nature’s bachelors. Certainly, he does not always fare well with women: he becomes infatuated with one girl or another at first glance, but ordinarily, once the engagement is afoot, the scales fall swiftly from his eyes, and he is desperate to escape one way or another. He is not keen to take on responsibility for anything, whether it is something so small as a fish, let alone a wife and her considerations: he takes on flights of fancy, at times, where he romanticises the idea of taking in a dog or a child, but these interludes are ordinarily mercifully short.

It seems plain to me why he resents the concept of marriage: he should prefer to remain free to pursue his own whims, and not be chained to the wants and expectations of another.

“No, sir,” I say.

“I couldn’t bear to live with a girl,” he says softly, and he leans back on his pillows, looking mournfully toward the window, although the blind is down, and he can see nothing out of it. “I like… I prefer you, Jeeves, if it’s all the same to you.”

My head spins. He knows not what he means, but nonetheless, my head spins, my heart beating hard. “Thank you, sir.”

“And when you, er, when you decide to— You know, toddle off into matrimonial bliss, I shall muddle through regardless.”

“Unlikely, sir.”

“Hm? What?”

“I have no intentions of marrying, sir.”

Mr Wooster is very still. His gaze remains fixated on the blind, his body so unmoving as to be statuesque beneath the sheet and blanket. I watch him slowly inhale, his nostrils flaring. “Oh,” he says. “Well, you oughtn’t… Oughtn’t say that, Jeeves. I’m sure there’s a brainy lass out there with the same, er, formidable intellect and whatnot, with the fine figure. Just waiting for you to snap her up and marry her.”

“Perhaps so, sir. Nonetheless, it is no ambition of mine to marry.”

“I— Well, why _not_?”

I look at him for a long, cold moment as he turns to stare at me beseechingly, and then he looks away, ashamed. “Oh. I oughtn’t ask such things, I suppose. Matters of propriety and all that.”

“Yes, sir,” I agree quietly, although in a gentler tone than I had been employing for the duration of our night’s discussion. Certainly, I speak truly: much as I should not like to give up my work to another’s command, nor involve other people in my household, nor should I like to balance my free moments with the responsibilities of a wife or, I shudder at the thought, of children. This is part of the reason I so appreciate service: it scarcely bats an eye, that a valet should never marry, so long as a few strategic – but neatly failed – engagements are scattered throughout his lifetime.

I do not, although I should never say so, delight in the company of women. It is perhaps an aversion I gained as a child, serving as a page in a girls’ school and seeing at first hand the way they act with one another, surprisingly conniving, and so keen to affect one another to cry, so vicious in their social rituals. I had never seen, as a young man, the appeal of the girls so keenly described as beautiful or charming by my fellows…

My tastes run to other men. Handsome men. I like tall men; men with blue eyes and curls; men who sing; men who laugh. The nature of my inversion is one I have never shared with another living soul, but for in near-anonymous, dark places, wherein one never uses one’s name, where one obscures one’s face, where movements are frantic, lest one be caught, or discovered.

“Sorry, Jeeves,” he says, apologising to me for the third time this evening.

“Sir?”

“I make such a lot of work for you, don’t I?” he asks sorrowfully, his brow furrowed in careful thought. “I never know how to refuse these things, to say… It isn’t the done thing, to say to a filly, now, listen, I’m sure you’re the most fulsome girl about, but I should not like to meet you at an altar at any point. Even when one tries, they seldom believe it. I don’t… Oh, gosh, Jeeves, how does one bally well _do_ it? Women aren’t like coves, they show all their feelings at once, and they cry, and it strikes me as dashed unfair, that they can send a whole proceeding their way simply with a tear or two, whereas if the gentleman so much as raises his voice, he’s…” He trails off.

His voice continues, and I see his lips move, but my mind does not seem willing to digest the words as they have been spoken, and for a long moment, I am utterly silent. I say, “I beg your pardon, sir?” and I hate the slight tremble in my voice.

If Mr Wooster notices it, he gives no indication. “I said, Jeeves,” he says, in a softly even tone, almost entirely without emotion, his expression blank, “that sometimes, I wish I had been in that car.”

“Perhaps a drink, sir?” I ask, already moving toward the door.

“No, thank you, Jeeves,” he mutters, and I watch him shift in the bed, lying down on his side and looking toward the window. “I know I drink too much. Dashed awful stuff, but it’s a good palliative, if palliative is the word I mean.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. I find myself lingering at the foot of his bed, and then I turn to close the door, that the halo of light from the other room does not linger on his face any longer, and leave us in the pitch darkness of his bedroom. It takes me a few seconds to digest the fact that I, without thinking, have closed the door with myself on the wrong side of it, and I stand with my palm spread against the wood.

“Jeeves?” he asks.

“Yes, sir?”

“That Spinoza chap.”

“Sir?”

“Dashed complicated.”

“Yes, sir.”

“He— Do you, do you know how he died, Jeeves?” I blink.

“From a lung illness, sir,” I say. “Scholars believe it was perhaps tuberculosis, or some similar ailment of the chest.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “But— But I was reading, er, about it, just a little, and they… I read a passage, and it said that— You know, because he made all those telescopes and microscopes and what-not, as well as sort of… Splitting the melon, with the philosophy, and it said that he was probably quite _so_ ill because he’d inhaled all of the dust from the glass. You know, when it was all ground down. And I thought about that, for quite some time, the… Just the thought of it gives one the willies, Jeeves, all those sharp little shards running down one’s throat and sticking sharp about the old breathing apparatus, but I just thought it was so sad, that he should be killed by his… By his life’s work, and whatnot. He was very young, wasn’t he? When he died, I mean?”

Standing with my back to Mr Wooster, I stare into the blackness, feeling my fingers on the cool wood of the door. He speaks very quietly, but I can hear him quite easily in the silence of the room. This preoccupation with death is not in-character for Mr Wooster, which in itself, is distressing, but—

 _I was reading_ , he says. I have never known Mr Wooster, but for on adherence to sharp orders delivered by Florence Craye, to attempt to read philosophy. Such lofty ideas, he says, are beyond his means of understanding. He does not even understand the implications of many of the songs he plays on the piano, singing out merry entendres without a thought as to their meaning.

 _I was reading_ , he says, and not in reference to some thriller or other, but to _Spinoza_. My mind is agog. When? Where? _Why_?

“Forty-four, sir,” I answer.

“Yes,” Mr Wooster says. “But I— I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, Jeeves. I don’t believe I understood any of it. Of the Spinoza.”

“No, sir?”

“No. But I— I think, that is to say, I suppose I… It seemed to me, Jeeves, that one of his, er, his percepts, if that is the word I mean—”

“Precepts, sir.”

“Yes, precepts, is that if something is good, er, for people, that is, then it is good. And that if it is bad, in that… In that if it hurts people, it is bad.”

“A clean simplification, sir,” I say.

“And that— The more that you _think_ about something, what, and try to know why you should do something, the better you are. The more… The more _active_ , er, because you understand why you do things, and therefore, you don’t, um, muddy the waters simply by speaking, or putting your foot in it, or whatever.”

“ _Yes_ , sir,” I say. “Sir, if I might ask, when did you read Spinoza?”

“Last month.”

“Last month, sir?”

“At Brinkley. I, er— Oh, I hope you won’t nip at me, Jeeves, but I put a dust jacket on the boards, to keep anyone from asking me questions I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer. Not you. But... But you know, Aunt Dahlia, they'd tease me awfully if they thought I was trying to read something that complicated. Read the damned thing from cover-to-cover, and I don’t think I understood a word.”

“With respect, sir, I believe you have grasped the central tenets quite well.”

“Only because another several books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, took the kindness of explaining them to me. And, frankly, Jeeves, I don’t understand how you can treat such things as if they’re, you know, nice, pleasant, bed-time reading. My head ached from it.” I recall, on our last excursion to Brinkley, that Mr Wooster had indeed spent a lot of the time in the library, and that he had requested on no less than three occasions in the two weeks we spent there, an aspirin to settle his throbbing head.

“May I ask you a question, sir?” I ask. I hold my breath.

“Yes, Jeeves. Ask me whatever you like.”

“Why did you spend so much time reading Spinoza, if the subject matter was one you found so difficult to digest?”

“You’re dashed stupid at times, Jeeves,” Mr Wooster says, and I turn to look into the darkness, but I can make out nothing but the vague shape of the bed.

“ _Sir_ ,” I protest sharply.

“Oh, I didn’t mean—” I hear him sigh in the darkness. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m… Merely that I’m tired, Jeeves, I didn’t mean to put it quite so bluntly, what. Just that you tell me often enough, all about this Spinoza chap, and how much you like him, and I’ve even bought you— You know. Just that it seems a silly question, asking why a chap should read a fellow, when you enthuse about said f. all day long and quite a bit of the night as well.” This is, of course, an exaggeration. I _do_ enjoy Spinoza, and read him often, as much as I read other improving books by more varied authors and philosophers, but exaggeration is well within Mr Wooster’s expected behaviour. So much so that I am almost blown away by it, when he has been so out of sorts this evening. “Are you happy, Jeeves?”

“I believe I told you, sir, I am most satisfied with my position as your valet.”

“Oh, _that_ , but… Are you _happy_ , Jeeves? Not— Not _with_ anything. Just. You know. Happy. Content.”

I consider the question. It is not a question one asks another man, I muse, nor indeed a woman – it is not a question one asks, as it has too complicated an answer. No one is, in the scheme of things, _entirely_ happy. Were one to spend their life in a state of complete satisfaction, it would cease, at its core, to be satisfying. Happiness cannot exist if sadness does not serve to offer its natural contrast, in much the same way that life, without death, would be meaningless.

And yet, with that said, I am pleased with the state of affairs in my life. I enjoy my work for Mr Wooster, and even during his sharp-minded periods, I am content to go on here; I enjoy sorting out the trifling misadventures of his many friends, solving their troubles and soothing away their woes; I enjoy the simple matters of my ordinary duties, buffing and polishing and tidying to the soundtrack of Mr Wooster’s music in the next room, all the more pleasant if I cannot hear the bawdy lyrics that accompany it. Moreover, Mr Wooster is… a _kind_ soul. I am fond of him, and I have come to care for him a great deal, in my years serving him. More selfishly, I find him pleasing to watch: he is handsome and possessed of easy charms, and it warms me to see him laugh and entertain his friends, his clever fingers working upon the piano keys, even to see him sprawled in his bed in some state of blissful repose. In these moments, at times, I dream I might reach out, and touch him, kiss him, take him in my arms, and the nature of my inversion is likely one that would astonish and horrify him, perplex him beyond measure—

But nonetheless, I am content to be as I am, in Mr Wooster’s company.

“Yes, sir,” I answer.

He exhales in audible relief. “Good, Jeeves. Very good.”

I do not what possesses me to ask. It crosses fast over the line of propriety, of proper standards between servant and master, and I can only defend myself in saying that I am thrown somewhat off-balance by his behaviour of the eve (or, more accurately, the morn), and I speak without thinking, which is not in my nature. “Are you, sir?” I ask.

The silence is thick with tension between us.

“That will be all, Jeeves, thank you. Good night,” he says softly, and I reach back for the door to leave. I hope, pray, beg to the universe at large, to Nature, to _God_ , that he calls me back in, that he says, “Oh, yes, of course I am,” or offers some explanation, offers some thing I can _fix_ , even. He does not, and for some minutes after leaving, I stand outside his bedroom door, frozen, knowing not what to do.

Eventually, I return to my bed, and lie there, not sleeping, until it is time for me to rise.

\---

The next morning, no mention is made of the incident. Mr Wooster conducts himself with his usual cheerful indolence, bright smiles, laughter, exaggerated facial expressions. The Bertram Wooster I had seen the night previous, a quiet ghost of little expression, tears on his cheeks, his mind ever adrift in dark, shadowy thoughts, is quite gone.

And yet, I think, as I watch him play the chords on the piano for some sea-shanty, perhaps he isn’t.

That evening, I undress him for bed, and I can see the exhaustion in his eyes. Did he sleep at all last night? I fear I cannot ask.

“Jeeves,” he says softly, when he is dressed in his pyjamas, and not yet moving toward his bed. We stand together, and he looks up into my eyes. He has a handsome face, as I have noted before, with clean lines, beautiful blue eyes, eyelashes that look to be made of some golden thread… “Jeeves,” he says again, urgently, and I fancy I see him lean forward slightly on his feet, swaying just slightly toward me.

“Sir?” I ask.

His lips part, displaying the pink bud of his tongue behind his teeth, and he seems to be on the very edge of a confession, of some desperate word or other. The moment passes, then, and he turns his face away. “Thank you, Jeeves,” he says. It seems to me there is some emphasis on these words there normally is not, but it is not my place to question it, and I move to pull back the sheet, that he might climb into bed. “Dashed lonely, isn’t it,” he says, as I move to turn off the light.

“Sir?” I ask.

“Sleeping in a big bed alone, I mean. Makes one muse on the subject of marriage, I think. Feeling another— Another soul beside you, I mean, and their heartbeat, their breathing, and what not. I feel sometimes perhaps I ought buy a smaller bed.” It sounds… But no. It is not an invitation, nor even the ghost of one: it is just one of Mr Wooster’s vague wonderings, voicing thoughts before they are even complete in his own head. He rambles: I am used to it.

“I could not advise it, sir,” I say. “It goes very well with the furniture.”

“Ha,” he says softly. “Wisely put, Jeeves.” He rolls over in the bed, his eyes closing, and I flick off the light. “Good night, Jeeves.”

“Good night, sir,” I reply.

“Jeeves?”

“Sir?” I stand in the light from the open door, not looking back at him.

“I don’t think you’re stupid, Jeeves,” he says. “You’re the smartest cove I’ve ever met, or will meet. And you aren’t a liar, and your eye is no more judicious than any other man’s eye, unless the young master has rather biffed it with a choice of fashionable hat, and you don’t make me feel two feet tall at all. You make me feel…” I wait, in fervent anticipation, for the sentence’s completion, but it is lost in the blackness. “Do you ever feel, Jeeves, that your bed is too big for one man?” he asks. There is no implication in his tone. The question is asked so earnestly that my eyes burn, although they do not water.

Frozen for only a moment, I reply, “At times, sir, sleep is a lonely non-existence.”

“Yes,” he agrees. He doesn’t sound disappointed: at the same time, he sounds devastated. “Yes, that’s it. Good night, Jeeves.”

“Good night, sir,” I say.

He does not call me back again.

Not that night.


	2. Chapter 2

I’m not proud of it, you understand.

When a cove is old enough, he must learn to put away his childish things and what-not, and be a man, and I know that very well, much as my Aunt Agatha and her sort might disagree with me: once I was in my last few years at Eton, I put aside a lot of my childish things, games and adventure novels and all that sort, and thus free of such g. and a.n. and a.t.s., I moved readily on in a fine fashion, ship-shape and ready for the voyage of life, and all that.

I no longer wore shorts; I wore sensible shoes; I put myself with gusto into the morning’s toilette, especially viz. teeth cleaning and regular baths and such; I did my best to not be covered so absolutely in mud, and turned up the nose at any muddy activities that any youthful soul yearns for.

I was to be a _man_ , and a man I was.

And yet—

And I am childish, I know that. I am perhaps not so much of a naïf as my good friends and relatives seem to believe, where they consider the old Wooster corpus completely removed from the turnings of Heaven and Earth, and thus without awareness of the simple facts of the day-to-day, but nonetheless, I _am_ childish. I am impulsive at times, and loud, and I like to stop and pet pusscats or pet good dogs upon their noble heads. I am satisfied by easy songs, and I enjoy amusing anecdotes and japes and what not. I like to _play_ , and I read books that are not so improving as Jeeves – that is to say, my valet, my gentleman’s gentleman, my guiding flame – should like them to be.

Of course, when a fellow says, “I’m not proud of this,” and then goes off on a dashed long monologue about other things, I suppose as the reader or listener or audience or whatever word you like, one thinks, “Oh, gosh, what horror is this chap hiding? Has he a secret wife in his attic? Has he got several secret wives, all dead, and lined up in his cellar, like Bluebeard?

Well, no.

I haven’t a cellar at all, even _sans_ the wives in question.

And I haven’t an attic, for that matter.

No, it is rather less dramatic than all that, but also, I suppose, more… More shameful. At least one _knows_ of people who have kept wives or killed them or whatever – one knows it isn’t _the_ done thing, given the mess and the immorality and such forth, but one knows it is _a_ done thing, what? Whereas—

Whereas what I do, that is to say, what I _indulge_ in, except that indulgence always seems as if it ought be something lovely and full of richesse, I know nobody does, even in literature. And it is… It’s quite _pathetic_ , truth be told, and not in the romantic way people use, sometimes, to say, “oh, he was pathetic, but it was beautiful!” or whatever nonsense as that.

I wake at a little past two o’clock, and my mind is awash with the fanciful dreams of any young man’s mind, except they _aren’t_ : I didn’t let my eyes close again, staring into the dark, and yet in my mind’s eye repeated the vision again and again: soft lips, downcast eyes with dark lashes, a face in the dark, unfamiliar and yet—

I grit my teeth.

It’s never exactly the same, the dream. A few of the beats, the crucial elements, remain the same, but these c.e.s are the worst of it: the mouth that kisses, warm on my lips, rougher than any filly has ever been in laying her mouth against mine; the hand that caresses, fingers running rough up the side of my thigh, gripping tight where they reach my hip, grounding me in place; the _voice_ , that talks!

And such talk it is.

Such talk, in fact, that I scarcely dare to write it down, lest it be discovered by some hitherto unknown party, and that h.u.p. should want to ruin his chum Wooster, and yet write it down I shall, on these pages inside my head, imagining the movement of my hand on the paper where I do not dare to truly take up a pen, and later on, I shall burn these mental pages, every one: I wake from my slumber, on nights like these, my gut a mess of tangled wire, my skin flush with a sweat that glistens in the dim light that filters in from the window.

And I am—

Why should I worry for shocking? These are just words on a page, and yet I feel my whole anatomy give a dreadful shudder as I even _think_ the words, not yet giving myself the will to write them, in stark ink upon the page. I have already said, haven’t I, that these pages will be burned?

There are things one is raised not to speak on. Not to speak on, not to discuss: there are things that are never polite, even in the most intimate settings, and even as I lie abed, my face pressed as tightly to my pillow as I might manage, I feel as if I might bally well drown in my shame. It has a liquid feel, shame. It slicks cold over one’s skin, pouring down one’s throat and filling one’s lungs to choking bursting, and one feels the weight of its pressure on one’s whole corpus, and one is lost beneath the—

No. No, I’ve lost hold of the bally thing. It begins with a d. Demurge, maybe? De… Jeeves would know.

Imagine waking Jeeves up at a time like this.

 _Deluge_ , that’s the boy!

Shame is like a deluge.

The talk in the dreams makes me wake up ashamed and desperate with it, makes me wish I could go clamber into a fire and burn there: the things I dream of… And I wake, my stomach a tangle, as I said before, my skin flush, and my member tumescent beneath my bedclothes, often wet at its head, and _aching_.

Hardly fair of a dream, I think, not to play fair like that: one might have all the self-control he pleases, when one is awake and walking, what? One might think about other things, about cold water, about blanc mange, about mud and frogs and newts, anything to make one’s blood flow a little cooler and slower in one’s traitorous veins, what? But in a dream, why, there’s no control at all, and the hapless young master thinks these _awful_ thoughts, and wakes up hot beneath his collar, and hot everywhere else besides, and wishes he were hot enough that he might turn to ashes.

I’ve never known such an ache as that one, a sort of desperate _itch_ to touch, and yet touch, I know I mustn’t: I turn on my side and curl in my knees slightly, that I might ignore it as best I can and will it away, feel the creeping, prickling _d._ of shame over my skin. Sometimes I grip so tightly at my pillow I fear the case will tear, but tear it does not – or at least, it hasn’t yet.

Bertram has some measure of self-control left to him, at least.

I recall, vividly, as a young man: I could scarce have been older than ten, and I was caught in the lonely act by Aunt Agatha, who had barged into my room with some complaint about… I no longer recall, now that it happens: it had been, I think, about some matter of my wardrobe, about shoes or jackets or something or other, but what comes to me now is only the memory of the bloodcurling _terror_ I’d felt, the way she’d hauled me by my scruff like some errant cat, the scorching smack of her aged palm across my cheek. It had been a blistering blow – for days after, I’d been redder on one side than the other, and Lord, how she’d _yelled_. Never before had my Aunt Agatha hollered like that, and never, I don’t believe, has she done so since.

I’d been sent to Aunt Dahlia’s for a while – she thought the country air would do be some good, keep me occupied with healthy activity. Even as I think on it now, the very form trembles in horror, in remembered fear: night after night I had lain in my bed, anxious, and I was scarcely ever left alone, before I went off to Eton, and the matter was then allowed to fall down.

I hadn’t even known why I was _doing_ it, at that age, had merely begun doing so, but Aunt Agatha had been so bally furious I thought she would outright _kill_ me, and she’d been so apoplectic with rage, her features white with rage, her teeth clenched, I thought too that she might well kill herself with the stress on her heart, to be so full of frenzied wrath.

I never dared, after that, even at Eton, when I’d hear some of the other young lads engaged in what I’d heard a clergyman once call _self-abuse_. The _sound_ had been unspeakable, and I dig my fingers into side of my thigh, praying that the pain might distract me from the sympathetic reaction even _recalling_ it draws out in me: the wet slap of palm on skin, the soft creak of the metal frames of their beds, the occasional breathless moan. It had driven me _mad_ then: it drives me mad now, fills me with a thousand memories of being fifteen, sixteen, more limb than man, scarcely even to _breathe_ without my body taking it as some helpful clue toward reproduction, and stiffening the form that Bertram might put himself to work.

Exercise helped, of course. I was never especially a good one for sports, but I did my best to allow myself not even a second in my day that I should be entirely idle, and a restless soul I am regardless: I threw myself at the piano, at the guitar, even, for one ill-remembered summer, at the flute, before I decided I should be better off raising my _voice_ in song instead, that I not regale my eager audience with such merry, jaunty ditties as, “ _ftbtbftfttttft”_.

My classmates persisted night after night, but ever did my Aunt Agatha’s words ring in my ears, and I felt the most desperate shame that I wished at times to join them, felt such shame and _guilt_ when I woke with my bedclothes wet with a night-time emission, one I scarcely had the ability to fight off.

And then…

Once, Andrew Hoggerton, my upperclassman by a year, had clambered into my bed after lights out, had pressed himself to my back and breathed in my ear. I had been fifteen, and he was seventeen: he was a beautiful young man then, with skin a pale white, like ivory, and lips as pink as cherries. One would have been man to call him anything less than Byronic: he was possessed of a dark and charming wit, and often spent his time nimbly avoiding the attentions of the fag-master, Sam Harlowe, who disliked him immensely and was ever liable to beat him for even the smallest offence. Never had it dissuaded him: often, one saw him walking along rooftops or climbing through windows with the grace and poise of any light-footed feline, and upon his person at any time, there was liable to be a variety of libations, gaspers, gum, and even the tawdry etchings that I would shy away from as my peers eagerly crowded around.

“What’s this, Hoggo?” I asked. I had been expecting some form of japery, or that he might say to me, _“Oh, you know, Wooster, someone has pierced my hot water bottle! Isn’t it dreadful?”_ or, “ _Alas, Wooster, my bed is full of newts, and yours has only you in it, so I thought I might rest here a while,”_ but he said nothing at all. He laughed soft and hot in my ear, and I clenched my knees together, for Hoggerton always had the most dreadful effect on my constitution, and his lithe body pressed against my back was affecting me to heights (or ought I say deepest lows?) of disgrace.

And his hands, his _hands_ : the left clasped at my shoulder, but the right reached beneath my bedclothes, underneath my pyjama shirt, and I had to bite my lip to keep from yelping out a protest as his fingers made their curious voyage over my belly. His hand had been cool against my skin, and I thought every hair upon my anatomy must be standing to attention, my heart beating fast beneath my breast, and then his hand had travelled lower, had cupped me through my trousers.

Oh—!

How can I describe it?

How can I lay down in mere words, even words that I will see soon incinerated, when the very experience was beyond so base a thing as language, when I could be the best writer walking the earth, and still find my dictionary ill-equipped to offer me the right words? The pleasure had been impossible, ineffable: blood had run hot in my veins, and I had been so hard, so full of that aching desperation for another’s touch that I felt I might shatter right to pieces, lightning-white strikes of pleasure bursting behind my clenched-shut eyes.

I had _writhed_ , shaking my head as desperately I might, and the hand had drawn away. What torture, what impeccable torture, to be in this fellow’s arms, have his hand between my legs, where so desperately I wanted it, although I had never thought to want it there before, and refuse to let him go on.

Why, Hoggo had leaned back, looking at me in the darkness, and writ on his features I saw only confusion, bafflement. _Hurt_ , even.

“You _mustn’t_ ,” I had hissed, feeling the hot sting of tears in my eyes, thinking perhaps I might die, I was so engorged, my whole body stiff with tension, my heart seeking to explode in my chest. I had, up ‘til then, been quite ignorant of why kissing might be something desirous to a young lad – certainly, I had heard the other boys talk well on the subject of one girl or another, particularly actresses or singers of which they had glimpsed portraits in the papers or in Hoggo’s stash of illicit photographs, but actually _kissing_ a girl, holding her, had left me somewhat baffled, as to the appeal—

I saw it then.

I saw it there, in Hoggo’s cherry lips, in his dark eyes, in the pink tongue that glistened wet in the dark. Oh, I wished to _devour_ him, wished to drag him down on top of me and grind myself full against his body, find an end to my frustrations by making use of him, by _debasing_ him in rutting against him like a dog, and I had almost cried there before him, in my bed, but had only managed to keep the upper lip stiff by a hair’s whisper.

He had muttered some embarrassed apology, had crept from my bed and left me aware, evermore, of how cold a bed was without another in it, making me ache to share it once more, and knowing, my black heart close to crumbling within me, that more than prone to the solitary vice of _onanism_ , I was…

Subtly wrong.

Hoggo in bed with me had opened Pandora’s Box, and out of it flew a thousand things: my gaze, anew, travelled over my classmates, over some of my schoolmasters, over handsome men in the street, or men in the newspapers. I had looked at them before then, my gaze sometimes catching on their eyes or their strong chests or their hands or their shapely ankles, when we were undressing together for bed, and now, now, oh, how my dreadful, desperate hunger of the flesh made _sense_.

A rush of blood would soon follow, were I to let myself look for too long at the other boys wrestling, undressed and soaked with sweat, their bodies pressed tight against one another, and letting out such _groans_ ; I was sure to be left squirming, hearing some of my more handsome fellows read aloud from racy books of poetry, and thinking of them whispering it in my air instead; oh, and alas, when summer came, and a-swimming we went, with so much wet skin on display…

I know not the proper word for it, although I know there must be word, for there are always words, medical words, for the weaknesses of the human form. I knew some of the fags were of that ugly inclination, as myself, and Hoggo himself, apparently—

Aunt Agatha hadn’t mentioned it, in that terrifying moment of discovery, but I had heard, once before, frantic whispering of my aunts behind closed doors, when they thought I could not hear them, although at the time I was secreted beneath the window. Not to eavesdrop, you understand – that would hardly be _preux_ , although thoughts of the _preux_ are doubtless beyond me, as I confess so many other defects – but to search for a book I had inadvertently dropped from my window a few minutes previous, after leaning out over the sill to look at the sunset.

I had been fourteen, perhaps, was only home from Eton for the holiday, and I had heard their voices raised but still whispering: frightened to be heard, and yet angry.

“Don’t _say_ that of him, Agatha, it’s hardly—”

“Hardly! Hardly! Would you have him grow up and be _arrested_? I knew the moment I caught him like that: doubtless it is the fact of his parents’ death that has made him so _insular_ , and—”

“He isn’t insular! He _isn’t_ , Agatha: he’s a charming young man, and he’ll make a wife very happy one day, and you mustn’t—”

“I know these things, Dahlia! We need to keep him under a firm hand, ensure—”

“He needs _freedom_.”

“Freedom? Are you mad? He disobeys even the most stringent rule, and you would offer him liberty to misuse at his pleasure? Watch him, fussing over the letters from his schoolfriends. I wouldn’t be surprised if even now, one of them has _corrupted_ his stupid sensibilities and made of him a—”

“Don’t you dare say it!” Say what, I had wondered desperately, even as I had crawled away, and I didn’t know, I _didn’t_ , had not connected such cleanly printed dots (is it any wonder Jeeves looks at me as if I am so stupid at times?) until I lay side-by-side with Hoggo in my bed, in those desperate moments before he crawled away.

Had he disliked me after that, I believe I could have forgotten all about it, convinced myself it was some other error of mine that drew his ire, but he didn’t: he looked straight through me when he saw me, never so much as acknowledged my existence, acknowledged the existence of the Wooster person in Eton’s hallowed halls. _Floreat Etona,_ he must have thought, _and commarcet Bertie Wooster_. Perhaps he killed me, in doing that: perhaps the dreams I have of that face, those cherry lips, where occasionally I see _his_ form instead of that of a stranger, are the only semblances of reality left to me!

Perhaps I am already dead.

(I know. I know that I am not.)

My eyes are wet, I realize.

It is usually enough, when I wake up of a night like this, to imagine writing out my words, as so: I imagine my hand upon the page, moving swiftly as it does when I am working upon one of my humorous novels, and it affords me a distance from my situation I am sorely in need of, but now, the distancing effect fails me.

My eyes are wet, and I have to bite down hard on the knuckle of my thumb to keep myself from letting out a sob. My bedroom is too close to Jeeves’, only a little away that he might hear me if I ring or call for him in the night, and I move – as I have so many times before – from the bed, and creeping silently down the corridor.

I do not put on my dressing gown or my slippers, that I can move with better a. A-word. Jeeves would know it, again. Avarice? Avuncular? _Alacrity_.

My bare feet are all but silent upon the carpet in the corridor, and I do not close the door all the way, for it creaks on the last few inches, and I move, silhouetted in the moonlight, to sit on the sofa.

I feel foolish at the first sobbed whimper that exits my mouth, and I let myself slide further, down onto the floor where no one might see me. Not that anyone _would_ see me – I don’t often have an audience in my living room, unless it’s some of the boys from the Drones and I am playing on the piano – but nonetheless, the thought abounds, and I bury my face in my hands.

 _This_ , this, I know, men don’t do.

Even at Eton, scarcely any of the boys had ever burst into _tears_ – I could only recall one time when another boy sobbed, and that was young Hamish Everton, whose mother died two weeks after we started school, and he sobbed himself to sleep for weeks on end.

I sob now.

It’s an ugly noise, desperate, heaving breaths that cut through my lungs, drag at the back of my throat, and I press my face as closely as I might into my palms. I can hardly help the torrent of traitorous images that burns before my tortured mind’s eye: Andrew Hoggerton in my bed, nude instead of in his pyjamas, and touching himself before my eager stare; a faceless man pinning me down in my bed and kissing me so hard my lips bruise; Jeeves, shining shoes, Jeeves, holding his umbrella above his head and watching me with an eyebrow raised in sardonic expectation; Jeeves, with a soft smile on his handsome lips—

I heave in a desperate gasp. I am cold, but I barely notice, drowning as I am in more important feelings.

It had been vital, once I realized what Aunt Agatha and Aunt Dahlia had been talking about, that I be less… less _whatever_. I threw myself into my scripture study anew, and into music, into everything, so _desperate_ to just be—

I always try my hardest. I try to convince myself, each time, that this girl will be _different_ , that she’ll be the filly to bring old Bertram from his wandering thoughts, to make him settle down with a _wife_ , instead of just thinking, again and again, about some faceless cove, any cover… Every time, I enthuse over her hair, her eyes, the shape of her profile, her body, her hands, even. I’ve heard other men talk about women, and I’ve read books, I know what is supposed to be attractive, and yet, and yet, how can I…?

How will I marry one of them?

 _How_?

I couldn’t. I couldn’t possibly. The idea sickens me to my core, feeling some soft-touched woman reach out to me in the night, put her hand between my legs like Andrew Hoggo had, and feeling so _wrong_.

And yet, what is to be done?

One can hardly be caught thinking about other _men_ , thinking about them, writing about them, _looking_ at them: were I to ever reach out and touch another man, I think, Lord, what would happen to be then? I should burst spontaneously into flames, electing combustion over anything else, and even if the c. didn’t happen as so, why, what of discovery? The very thought chills my bones like— Like something very chilly. I don’t know. Like ice, perhaps. Fire. Ice. Damnation.

I see sometimes, coves in the papers locked up for indecency charges, and everyone comments, oh, you would never think him so _evil_ , so _degenerate_ , such a monster, and I am aware of the hot tears on my cheeks, because I do not want to be a monster, I _do not_ , and what am I to do? Were I to go to a doctor, I should be put in a sanitorium, surely, and what disgrace it would bring, and how _angry_ Aunt Agatha would be, Aunt Dahlia, and what if, after all that, they couldn’t cure me? What then?

And were I to weaken, and corrupt some man to my purpose, ruin him with my desires, prison. Prison…

I hear a noise in the corridor, and I go as still as I can, breathing soft through my mouth that my breaths not be discovered. My blood _is_ like ice now, as I hear Jeeves’ strong, sure steps come down the hall, hear the door push open, and I am as still as I can manage, shifting my foot slightly to keep myself in place.

Dash it all.

I flinch as I hear his steps come closer, and I glance up at him.

Silhouetted in the darkness, scant moonlight illuminating his features, I fancy that he is the most beautiful thing I have ever looked at. He looks as if he has been cast of marble, his jaw strong, his nose noble, his skin pale and smooth in the wan light, and his hair looks so soft I could yell it to the rooftops, lacking the usual crisp slickness of the brilliantine he wears to keep it down.

“Oh, sorry, old thing,” I say, trying to inject a sort of cheerful casualness into my voice. I don’t think he can see me, sitting on the floor like this, like a child in the dark, that he can see my face, but I can feel the shame bubbling within me, and I wish I could crawl under the chesterfield and utterly escape his notice, but there is no e. the n. of Jeeves once he has decided to n. you. “Did I wake you?”

“Sir,” he says, his voice a sleep-hoarse rumble, and I feel as if I will begin to sob anew, it makes my skin feel so tight on my traitorous body. Why Jeeves? Jeeves, the inimitable, the incorruptible, so perfect that women swoon over him as he passes, and I look at him, and I don’t even want to… To sully him with something so detestable as desire would be unspeakable, but at times, I ache only to be in his arms, that I might lay my head on his strong breast, feel his arms about me. What would he think of me, if he knew? What— “Are you quite well?”

“Hm?” I say innocently, but the panicking is rising in a red flush up the back of my neck, and I am impatient for him to go away, to back to his room, before he knows, before he discovers, before he _hates_ me, for were Jeeves to hate me, were Jeeves to hate me, I would die. I would. I wish, sometimes, that I would die anyway, just… Drop dead. It would be easier. “Oh, yes, yes, fine, what,” I say, trying my best to be casual. Were I to not have been born, why, that would have been better, or to die with my mother and father in the car… It’s the only time I really think of them, I realize guiltily, when I think about this nasty ordeal, about wishing that _I_ was… Is that an insult to their memory? Any more or any less than their son being a… whatever it is I am? “Leave me to it, Jeeves,” I say pleasantly, “I shall be right as rain in a moment or two.”

“Sir—”

“I said _leave me, Jeeves_ ,” I say sharply, my eyes watering anew. He needs to… I see his body move in the darkness, see the anger in his form, and for a second, I wonder if he will hit me. I don’t know what I would do if Jeeves hit me. I would deserve it, I expect, were he to be so worked up to do so – just now, I’ve been very rude indeed, but…

“Have you imbibed, sir?” Jeeves asks, in the soupiest of his soupy tones, and I want to burst into tears once more, but holding onto my composure by a thread, I manage only to flinch, and not to scream.

“ _No_ , Jeeves,” I snap. I wish he wouldn’t be like this. I wish he would just… He isn’t even supposed to be _awake_. This is _my_ — “ _Push off_ , would you?” My tongue is moving before I can stop it to ask it what it plans on doing, spitting out words full of acid into the room, “If a man wants to sit in his own living room, he shall do so at any hour he likes, regardless off—”

Jeeves turns on the light, and immediately, I think of those lamps they use in interrogations. You know, in the detective novel, where the gallant hero is tied down to a chair, and they shine a light in his face, that he is disoriented, and confused. I am neither, but oh, how I wish I was. I don’t dare look at him, for I know how he must be looking at _me_ , with that flat, disapproving expression he so often gets when he looks at me, when Bertram isn’t living up to what he should like, and in such a way as to imply neither me or any other Bertram imaginable could live up to what his Jeeves expects of him.

I shudder, feeling the air punch from my lungs, and I dip my head between my knees, my fingers interlinking tightly at the back of my head. I wish I could turn to stone here, like some chap under Medusa’s gaze – Medusa’s gaze would always be preferable to one of Jeeves’ stony looks.

“Go away, Jeeves. Leave me be,” I say, although I know it is too late now: I am in for something that is distinctly _not_ a scolding from my valet, for he would never outright chide me, but is so much worse, for he will… He will _look_ at me, and I’ll feel as if I’m before a magistrate, squirming beneath his stare. I am trembling, I realize, with the desperate shame, with the _humiliation_ of being caught crying, and for no reason at all, that I might voice.

“I think you ought back to bed, sir,” Jeeves says, his voice still slightly stiff. Most men, I know, are not so susceptible to the whims of their valets, and many times before, I have rebelled against Jeeves’ command over my person: I recall, I _told_ him, when first he joined my service, that I would _not_ be that sort of gentleman, and yet, how can I not be? Even were it not for the fact that I am so full to the brim with adoration for Jeeves’ fine character that I might walk off a cliff he asked me, that I would like as not do anything at all, if he put it across in a reasonable enough manner, Jeeves is usually _right_ , and I wish he wasn’t. I wish he was ugly, and pig-headed, and stupid, in the way some valets are – not the higher stock from the Junior Ganymede, but the sort of agency dregs I was once left with.

“I don’t want you— looking at me, Jeeves.” I confess, although I hate the words for burning my lips on their swift leave of my tongue, and I dig my fingers into the back of my head, wishing Jeeves were not so fastidious in his attention to my manicure, and that I might have the crescent-cut of nails to ground me. “Always so… Always with the judiciary eye, what? Makes a man feel like he’s two feet tall. I would rather be alone, if it’s all the same to you.”

He won’t go.

I know he won’t.

I wonder, in one stark moment, what it would be like to drown. My father had died in a car accident, when he and my mother had gone over a bridge and the stone crumbled: they say he broke his neck when they hit the base of the river, the front of the car crumpling up against them. My mother’s leg was caught, and she drowned, never able to struggle free. Which would be better, to die by?

Oh, if Aunt Agatha only knew. I disappoint her dreadfully already, I know, and yet there are leagues of disappointments she doesn’t even know about, about the business of the _other boys_ , and about my weaknesses of the flesh, and about Jeeves, and everything, and now even that I am an orphan, and that I don’t care. I do care, of course, I don’t mean to say I don’t care a whit, merely that it has never made any difference to me, one way or the other, and I…

This is why I never try to write these things down. I try my best not even to think them. I don’t remember what my parents’ faces look like. There are photographs, somewhere, I’m sure, but I think a chap is supposed to remember the features of his own mater and pater, especially when they die in some grizzly accident when he is a nipper, but… _Well_ , I almost want to say, to some imaginary judge of my own design, frowning at me for not caring that I am an orphan, _I never knew them that well, what? Even before the business of the orphaning, I was beset my nannies_ _and aunts and what-not. Scarcely even saw the old parental set._

But that strikes me that it would likely be a very callous thing for one to say. I would prefer to drown, I think. What with all the s. mentioned earlier, I feel I should be quite used to it.

“It is not, sir,” Jeeves says, and for a moment, I have no idea what he bally well means. _If it’s all the same to you_ , I said, _I would rather be alone_ : he says it is not. He sounds quite annoyed with me, and if I can _hear_ that he’s annoyed, I’m in for it. Yes, I think. To drown, that should be rather nice, and if I drowned, they needn’t worry any longer about trying to put me to marry some woman, and trying to juggle me about like some complicated burden between them, and they should never know _what I am, what I **am** , _and be brought down with the dashed shame of it.

There’s nowhere good to drown oneself within reach, and so I grab at the cushion behind me and throw it at Jeeves, wishing it a concrete slab. “Oh, _dash_ it, Jeeves!” I say, with a tone of some finality. I am hoping to thus appear commanding and angry, that Jeeves should fall prey to the feudal spirit and leave me be.

Instead, I begin to cry again in earnest.

The sounds I release are the most pitiful I have heard from any throat, and I bury my face in my hands, letting out sob after sob. I feel run ragged, and I wish it would all just _stop_ , that the world would stop spinning, that _I_ might stop—

“Oh, get _out_ , Jeeves!” I dare to look at him. He has that stuffed-frog of disapproval on his puss, and I wish I could throw myself at him, take solace in his arms, have him in my bed, wished I might be a woman that I could look at Jeeves and _marry_ him, and I know it is mad, mad, _unhinged_.

“No, sir,” Jeeves says stolidly, and I am on my feet before I even know what I am doing.

“Am I not your employer?” I demand, and it is only a burst of indignation, that he should wield his feudal spirit as a club to beat me with, that keeps me from sobbing the words.

“Yes, sir,” he says reasonably.

“Will you not _ever_ do as I say?” No. No, he won’t, and I know this, I know it as I know there are stars in the sky: I am the _young master_ in naught more than words, and Jeeves is the commander of this vessel, and I am _aware_ , and I hate it, because I know it is supposed to be the other way around. I know it: I am spineless, and weak, and mentally negligible, and all besides, and yet when I _try_ to take an interest, and take command, everyone tells me stop, Wooster, you’re an idiot. And what is an idiot to do, when his idiocy offends, and when his attempts to rise beyond idiocy offends yet more so? “Must you be such an _insufferable_ —”

I look at Jeeves’ handsome, finely-chiselled visage. Said v. isn’t insufferable in the least: it is one of the most sufferable v.s, I might go so far as to say, in the whole of the known universe. I wonder how ridiculous I must look to him, from behind that impassive mask he wears. Does he hate me?

He must.

I do, sometimes. Especially now, when I am being childish and unreasonable, and stupid.

I reach up, trying to rub away some of the tears staining my face, but I know it must make no difference at all, and I am still shaking, partly from the cold, and partly from the force of my upset. Perhaps I shall get the flu, and die. That would be easy. I am tearing up once more – is there no end to this font of tears? I might make of the Sahara an ocean, were I to be upset there. I look up at Jeeves, and my lungs are filled with choking shame. “You aren’t insufferable, Jeeves,” I say.

“Thank you, sir,” Jeeves says starkly. I would rather he have hit me, because it would have hurt less, and I cringe away from him.

“I hate the way you look at me, Jeeves,” I mumble. My tongue is moving without my behest, without so much as a by-your-leave, but I am so full of melancholy I cannot bear it, and I wish only to allow some of it _out_ , because I know it’s silly, that a young man of my age should wake up some nights and _cry_ , but I never know what else to do. I just feel so full, at times, and I laugh, and I drink, and that numbs it, and yet at times, it seems to come up behind me with a cosh and catch me unawares. “You do it all the dashed time, you know, you look at me and you _think_ — Oh, I don’t know what you think, but your face seems to say to me, it seems to say, oh, that stupid Wooster, so dim he doesn’t know his left from his right, happy as a clam because he doesn’t _know_ , and I— Dash it, Jeeves, I _do_ know. I know precisely how…” On some level, I want to believe that Jeeves knows everything, that he is the bookend of the universe on either side, that he knows all from the alpha to the omega, that is the wisest of wise old uncles, and yet… How many years span the distance between us? I almost want to ask, and yet I feel that it will shock me – it can’t be more than a decade. Jeeves can’t be older than forty. I know he is fallible: I have see him err. And yet his rummy _Jeevesness_ , it seems to me that he embodies perfection, and I… Damnation, I know I must disappoint him. I wonder, at times, why he stays with me, when he disapproves so much of my nonsense. “I know I don’t live up to your expectations, because I don’t live up to Aunt Dahlia’s or Aunt Agatha’s or the expectations, I’m sure, of any aunt alive, and Lord knows I should never measure up to the expectations of a wife, but I— I’m just so tired, damn it all!”

I gasp, feeling my thick nose and choked throat complain at this behaviour, and I ache for the days before I was ever needled at to marry, before Jeeves, before anything. Days where I would just sit about and watch the sun in the sky, and read novels, and where if I just didn’t let my gaze linger overlong on another boy, I might imagine… “I’m so tired, and I can’t get away from any of it, and sometimes I lie there in my bed and think, oh, gosh, I wish I could go home, but I am home, and I haven’t anywhere else to go.” The Drones is so easy, at the end of it all – all these young men who laugh and play, and most of them aren’t _at all_ handsome, or charming, and I love them all so dearly, and for once, I feel as if _I’m_ the bright spark, and… “Because they’re…” Oh, _Lord_ , I can’t tell Jeeves that. “Because _I’m_ …”

I can’t tell him that either.

The tears are hot where they fall down my freezing cheeks, and I imagine they might steam from my skin, imagine that they might burn down to my core and kill me with the shock. Once more, I think of my mother and father in the car, my father dead at the wheel, my mother with her arms stretched above her head, her hair untangled from its bun and hanging about her in the water like kelp. It was summer – there were mayflies, perhaps, that moved in the water about them, and danced in their air above them. Did they notice? Did they so much as care? Can a mayfly know what it is for a man to die, when their lives are so short? I can’t imagine my father’s face, but for a nebulous, ghostly figure, doubtlessly possessed of nose and mouth and eyes, but of a set I could not begin to guess; I can’t imagine my mother’s face, and yet I imagine her mouth open in a silent scream.

I wouldn’t have screamed.

I wouldn’t scream now. I would fill my pockets with stones, and walk…

Jeeves is looking at me, and I don’t know that I can stand it. In the moment, I am so desperate to convince myself that he is a man, like me, just a man, that I speak without thinking, and I say, miserably, “Your parents are alive, aren’t they, Jeeves?” _I bet he knows what his parents look like,_ I think. It sounds bitter where it rings off the inside of my skull. I’ve heard people say that the aristocracy are self-obsessed, and stupid, and they are doubtlessly right, because I am both.

And Jeeves isn’t self-obsessed at all. Sometimes I think that if I asked for it, Jeeves would take the moon down from the sky for me and tie a string about it, even if he knew he oughtn’t, and I wish I didn’t reward such devotion with stupid asides and thoughts of sullying him with kisses, and Jeeves…

I can’t look at his face.

I can’t bear it.

I stare at the juncture between his neck and his shoulders instead, and do my best not to shake.

“My mother, sir,” he says quietly. “My father died when I was seventeen.”

I _am_ self-obsessed. I feel an urge to throw myself to my knees and sob at his feet, tell him exactly how sorry I am, that he should have to have _me_ of all masters, when I am full of iniquities I dare not lend voice to, and when I think so much of my father, when I don’t know what he looked like, when I might not recognise me, if he spoke to me in the street, and Jeeves’ father is dead, and I didn’t know. I never asked. “Condolences, Jeeves,” I say. “I didn’t know.”

That is all I should say, but I feel I should explain, because I didn’t know about his parents, and doubtless he knows not of mine, except that they are dead. I didn’t know, when I was a boy, how they died. I vaguely recall it – I recall the quiet words, drawing me away after the birthday and saying I could not see them, and I recall the funeral, dressed in black. Aunt Agatha had insisted I wear black and black only for the rest of the year – black on black on black, and I _hated_ it, still hate to wear black even now, but I know it was unkind of me, to resent wearing mourning clothes for my parents, especially when now, I lack the grace even to remember them. “Horrible car crash,” I say, because it was horrible, I’m told. I remember hearing a servant tell some other visiting servant what had happened, just two ladies’ maids talking, and I was sixteen. No one would ever tell me before, how they had died, and it had only occurred to me then that I had never seen the car again. It is improper, I know, to ask how people died – it is morbid. I am morbid, I think. I do my best not to be, but on nights like these, when sleep evades me, when filthy thoughts creep up my spine and slide down my throat, when I am every bit the hapless sop I do my best not to be, I become very morbid indeed. “They say my father died on the impact, but my mother drowned. The bridge went quite out from beneath the car, and her leg was trapped in the— Dashed thing was all crumpled, and they said she must have struggled terribly, trying to get herself free.”

I stare down at the carpet. What would Jeeves do, if he knew what I was? Would he hate me? Would he report me? Would he put his hand in my hair and draw me to lie on his breast, that we might…?

“Can I tell you something, Jeeves, that I’ve never… that I’ve never told anybody?”

I feel sick.

How could I? How could I tell him? How could I render Jeeves’ little affection for me – and surely, I beg, I hope, I _pray_ , that there must be _some_ – utterly void? How could I affect him to cast me out, and to hate me, as Aunt Agatha does, because she knows what it is I am?

“You ought to bed, sir,” Jeeves says, and I feel the shock of freezing cold burn through my body. Does he know? He can’t possibly know. _Nobody_ knows: that is the point of me.

“Yes,” I say woodenly. I know he is right. I pray he won’t leave me. “I suppose.”

 _How old are you?_ I wish I could ask. _Have you ever loved someone, truly loved them, loved them so much your heart feels it might burst? Do you ever cry, Jeeves? Does it all feel like too much? Do you ever wish you could throw yourself into the Thames, and drown in it? Do you ever look at a man and feel your body light up as if struck with a match, and then wish God Himself would strike you down? Are you as frightened of my Aunt Agatha as I am? Are you as frightened of me as I am of you?_

The last thought makes more tears run down my cheeks, and I stare at his calloused, broad hand as it gently encloses about my wrist, leading me down the corridor. He holds me so gently – I imagine this is how he might hold a dove, were my wrist a dove. I wish I was a dove, that he might hold me like this always. His fingers are so warm, and when they finally release me again, so that he can pull back my bedclothes, I fancy I can feel their ghost lingering upon my skin, and that is all I am permitted of him, a ghost, as I fancy the ghost of Hoggo’s cherry lips and his imprint in my bed, as I fancy—

I sit down in the bed, but I don’t lie down, and I look up at him as I fold the blankets over my thighs, my waist. I stare at him, and silently, I beseech him to tell me I am a fool, and that I ought go to sleep and not worry my head with these things, to tell me something to distract me.

“You may tell me, sir,” he says instead, and for a second, I flounder. I can’t tell him! I can’t! I can’t! Oh, I couldn’t bare it, couldn’t bear for him to look at me the way Hoggo did, with disgust and betrayal and _hurt_ , and leave me—

“I was going to be in the car,” I say. It is true. I _was_. “I was only… I was only a little blighter, eight or so, and it was— It was Bingo’s birthday, you see, and I begged and begged them, that I might stay one day more, and that someone else’s father could bring me back to the metropolis the day after, or put me on the train. It was summer, you see, early summer. And they said… They said alright, Bertie, alright, we’ll see you tomorrow, and then they never did.” I wonder if this is deception, that I should say it like this. It makes it sound as if I feel guilty. It makes me sound pathetic, in a way, in a sort of sad, novelist’s way, as if I’m someone who remembers what his parents look like, and deserve any sympathy. I search, grasp, for something I might say, that should make him understand I am a dreadful, ugly man, without saying so outright, and bearing the shame. “I always wondered if there were mayflies in the water about the car. Dashed dreadful thing to think about, I’m sure. I never really knew what else to think.”

He's tidying, I notice, in a distant way. Fixing things, straightening books. I wonder if he’s ever slid into someone’s bed, behind him, so that their back is against his breast.

If I threw myself out of the window, would it kill me? We are rather high up… But no, no. I wouldn’t want him to see me, all— All smashed, and what-not, and the spectacle would be awful. Aunt Agatha would be furious.

“Is that why you are so upset, sir?” he asks. “Grief rearing its head?”

 _Grief_? I almost repeat.

“Oh, no, Jeeves,” I say. I can’t bear to lie outright to him. “No, it isn’t that.”

“Then what?”

“You were supposed to be asleep,” I say, hopelessly. I stare at the ceiling, so that I don’t have to look at his handsome face, all full to the brim with polite service and vigour. “You usually are.”

He doesn’t say anything.

I press my face into the pillow at the headboard, staring away from him, and I ask, “Am I a very awful man to you, Jeeves?” I don’t mean to mistreat him. I pay him more, I’m aware, than most men pay their valets, and I try to treat him well, to get him gifts for his birthday, and at Christmas, and I know that most people don’t do _that_ for their valets, either, but I don’t think that I could live without him, and the very thought of it makes me ache. And I think, ever and always, I think of what I should like to _do_ , were he… And it is so unfair. He should leave me. He should leave me, and run far away, and I would walk into the river or out of a window, and it would be so…

 _Easy_.

“No, sir,” he says, a little sharply, and I feel myself jolt on the bed. “Mr Wooster, I do not know what has brought about this despondency, but you are a very _kind_ man, and I should prefer, sir, that you know I am very proud to be in your service. You are not _awful_ at all.” Kind! _Kind!_ If only he knew! I am grasping at my bedsheets, and again I wonder I might tear something. I swallow, swallow hard, and I wish I could be carefree. People like the idea of me as carefree: I know that. When I act as if I care about things, or know anything, people become quite furious, Jeeves included.

“I’m sorry, Jeeves,” I say. For everything, I am sorry.

“There is no need, sir,” Jeeves says, which shows exactly how little he knows, as much as I convince myself so easily of his omniscience. “I would have awoken anyway.”

“I don’t…” Is this what it will be like, until the end of time? Living like this, night after night, kept from sleep, _woken_ from sleep, sobbing into my bedclothes? Hearing Jeeves forgive me, and knowing that he oughtn’t? My thoughts flit to _marriage_ , and I imagine a woman in my bed, looking at me instead of Jeeves, a woman talking to me in the mornings instead of Jeeves, a woman. I can’t bear to imagine a _specific_ woman – the idea is too wrong, too horrible. I imagine a woman sliding behind me in bed, like Hoggo had, and I wonder if Hoggo thinks of me, even now. I expect he has a wife. I expect he has forgotten about Bertram Wooster. I don’t think I could ever forget him in turn. “I don’t want to get married, Jeeves,” I say.

“Very good, sir,” he says, the way he does when he isn’t listening to me, and I feel indignation burn on my skin.

“No, _no_ , no, listen to me, Jeeves, listen to me,” I beg him. “Don’t just— Don’t just nod your head at the young master, great fathead that he is, and make your own…” That’s very unfair, I think. Jeeves has never called me a fathead, and he is so noble, I don’t think he would, even though I am one. “Listen to me. Please,” I finish lamely.

“I always listen, sir,” he says.

“You’re a liar, Jeeves,” I say before I can stop myself, and it is true. He does lie, sometimes. He’s good at lying. And he runs such circles around me, and sometimes I let him, and sometimes I am helpless to stop him. I would let him do anything to me, I realize, if I could only… I do my best to put as much seriousness as I can into the words: “I don’t… I don’t ever want to get married. Do you see? I should rather keep up this bachelor lark forever.”

I don’t know that I should have said _bachelor_. People sometimes say it in a sort of soupy, thick way, as if _bachelor_ is code for something else. Maybe that’s the word for what I am, all double entendre accounted for: _bachelor_. Bertram Wooster is a _bachelor_ , in italics. He is a _bachelor_ , don’t you know? He won’t ever get married: he’s a _bachelor_.

“I see, sir,” Jeeves says. I look at his shadowed silhouette in the darkness, and I wish he would tell me that he hates me, so that my mind would stop conjuring, again and again, the idea of him tenderly brushing my hair back from brow, and perhaps kissing said b. Oh, if he did that, I would die, and what a death it would be.

“Well?” I say. _Go on_ , I urge him, silently. _Tell me to go boil my head. Tell me I shall have to get married eventually, no matter what I am; tell me you will leave me, because you know what I am, and I don’t deserve you; tell me, tell me. Quit! Tell me_ —

“Well, sir?” he asks, and I clench my fists tight on the sheets.

“Oh, I know you have something to say about that, Jeeves,” I say. “Go on, then.” If I provoked him enough, would he hit me? I almost wish he would, sometimes. “Tell me— Tell me, _I can’t advise it, sir,_ or say, _What has provoked this outburst, sir?_ in those soupy tones of yours.”

“I can’t say I know what you mean, sir,” he says, and I scoff. As if he has ever… He can’t possibly _approve_. I wish I could say it. I wish I could write it down and hand him the paper – I wish I could say, Jeeves, Jeeves, I wish I’d kissed Andrew Hoggerton, and I wish I’d let him pull me off, and even if we’d been discovered, I wish—

“I don’t want to get married,” I say. I lay in it as much implication as I feel I can, which is scarcely any. I _yearn_ for a man’s body in my bed, and I wonder if I could die of a broken heart, without anybody breaking it particularly. My heart has always been broken, it seems to me. “Not ever. Not even to the most beautiful lass in the— on the continent, on another continent, on the planet, Jeeves, in the universe, what. You might bring me some beautiful girl from Venus, as pretty as the day is long, with burnished curls and a kind heart and soft lips and what-have-you, and I should still wish for you to fish me out of the soup and get her to marry someone else.”

 _Any girl!_ Any of them! I won’t marry them!

“Very well, sir,” he says quietly, and I whip to look at him. I can’t see him as well as I should like in the darkness of the room, can only see him looming in the darkness. He’s such a big man. He could lift me on one shoulder, if he wanted. He’s done that, actually, but never while I’ve been awake.

Could he mean it?

_Could he?_

“Really?” I ask. “You’d… You’d do that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Even if she was— I’m talking about a goddess, Jeeves, gearing up to marry the old Wooster corpus to her in matrimony, and— And pleasant, and kind, and… And thoughtful, and what-not, not aunt-like at all in her demeanour, the perfect woman, no flaws whatsoever, and I wouldn’t want to marry her, and you’d help me out of it?” Does he know? Does he know what I want so desperately to tell him? Does he understand, with that great, fish-fed brain of his? Does he know, and forgive me?

I could weep, but my eyes, it seems, have finally had their fill of weeping.

“Yes, sir,” he says dutifully. “If you are affianced against your will, it is my duty, I feel, to remove you from the case.”

“And never be married?”

“Not if you do not wish to be married, sir.”

“Oh,” I say. I wait, aching, for him to go on, but go on he does not. Oh, I wish he would only say it, say what I cannot, what I can’t _bear_ to. If he would say it, if he would only _say it_ , I feel I could… “And you’re not going to… You’re not going to, er, ask why?”

 _Please_ , I wish I could beg. _Please, ask me, and let me tell you about Hoggo, and how much I wanted him, and how much I still want him, and how much I want what I know I must never have, and oh, Jeeves, is this how Eve felt, looking at those luscious fruits hanging heavy upon the tree? And she was weak, and she ate them, and then she felt such shame? I feel such shame now, Jeeves, please, ask me, ask me_ —

“No, sir,” he says.

I look at the window instead of at him. “I couldn’t bear to live with a girl,” I say. I wish it was enough. I wish I could look him in the eye and say, _Jeeves, my man, one day I shall probably lose my will, and I shall go to prison for buggery, and when I do, I want you to know it had naught to do with your fine tutelage, and it shan’t have been your fault at all._ Or, _Jeeves, if I die, by my own hand, even, you won’t feel guilty, will you?_

One doesn’t say these things, of course.

“I like…” I stop myself. I can’t say it. But I can say, “I prefer you, Jeeves, if it’s all the same to you.”

There. I’ve said it. I’ve said it! I might be sick. I hope I’m not. “Thank you, sir,” he says quietly.

“And when you, er,” I start, because I want to assure him, I want to ensure he _knows_ , that however I might feel, that whatever… Because I couldn’t take advantage. I couldn’t. I couldn’t! I couldn’t trap him here, with me. “When you decide to— You know, toddle off into matrimonial bliss, I shall muddle through regardless.”

“Unlikely, sir.”

Gosh. Strikes me as a bit thick, that, even if Jeeves is _annoyed_ at me. I _did_ survive before him, although I know not how. And certainly, I am probably making a deception again, because I wouldn’t muddle through nearly as well. To go without Jeeves, having been introduced to him, would doubtless be like a flower, introduced to sunlight and water, being put back in a dark cupboard.

But nonetheless.

“Hm? What?”

“I have no intentions of marrying, sir.”

My heart soars. Leaps! I feel it in my _mouth_! And then it sinks, for I know he can’t possibly mean what _I_ mean, because he is… Well. He’s Jeeves. They say cleanliness is close to godliness, but that seems silly to me: _Jeevesiness_ , on the other hand, is about as close to godliness as I can imagine. And I know he isn’t infallible, much as I like to imagine he is, but he wouldn’t be…

_Like that._

Women adore him. Fawn over him. He’s too _beautiful_ , too wonderful, too upright, to be like that. Like me.

He would never…

“Oh,” I say. “Well, you oughtn’t— You oughtn’t say that, Jeeves.” It’s my fault, I expect. He doesn’t have enough time off from me, and even on the days he _does_ take off, I often fall into bother, and he valiantly comes in like some handsome chevalier, sweeping me away from my troubles. The thought makes my heart ache. “I’m sure there’s a brainy lass out there with the same, er, formidable intellect and whatnot, with the fine figure. Just waiting for you to snap her up and marry her.”

“Perhaps so, sir. Nonetheless, it is no ambition of mine to marry.” No ambition. No ambition. Oh. Oh, he can’t mean it. He can’t. He can’t…

“I— Well, why _not_?” I ask, desperately, and he looks at me so darkly I feel I won’t _need_ to step out of the window, because the blow of that gaze knocks me cold. He can hardly… he can hardly _say_. It wouldn’t be preux. And I must be imagining it, I must be, because he would never—

No.

He would never.

“Oh. I oughtn’t ask such things, I suppose. Matters of propriety and all that.”

“Yes, sir,” he agrees. Mercifully, his tone has gentled somewhat, and yet I hate myself, for lowering him so much in my estimations, even for a few minutes, that I might think him capable of such salacious, ugly thoughts as myself, that I should _debase_ him in that fashion. The shame bubbles within me like a torrent, and once more, I am drowning: I could choke on it, I think. I could choke.

“Sorry, Jeeves,” I say.

“Sir?” he asks, voice innocent.

“I make such a lot of work for you, don’t I?” I ask, because that must be it. He can’t get married because it’s only _proper_ for him to look after me – he feels it’s his duty, and he could hardly take care of a wife at the same time. Perhaps that is why he says it is no ambition of his, that I not feel guilty, if I should ruin his life entirely. I _should_ get married. I know I should. I only wish I could find a girl that might be bearable, that I might fool myself into thinking… And I do. Every time, I think, oh, this is it, _this time_ , I can do it! I shall kiss her, and marry her, and then I do not. And those girls I ache to refuse, that I already know would hardly do… “I never know how to refuse these things, to say… It isn’t the done thing, to say to a filly, now, listen, I’m sure you’re the most fulsome girl about, but I should not like to meet you at an altar at any point. Even when one tries, they seldom believe it. I don’t…” And that is true, too. I think of Madeline Bassett, and Honoria Glossop, and all the other girls I’ve been engaged to, that have sort of strong-armed into the thing without even _asking_ me. And how they sometimes cry, after, as if it was all my fault! I wish I could cry like that, at times. I wish _I_ could be like one of them, with all these men declaring their affections, and I feel so hopeless. “Oh, gosh, Jeeves, how does one bally well do it? Women aren’t like coves, they show all their feelings at once, and they cry, and it strikes me as dashed unfair, that they can send a whole proceeding their way simply with a tear or two, whereas if the gentleman so much as raises his voice, he’s…” I couldn’t marry a girl. I couldn’t. I wish I could die. I wish I’d never been born. “I wish I’d died in that bally car.”

“I beg your pardon, sir?” Jeeves says.

I’ve said it once, I muse, feeling mad, feeling as if I am floating some miles above my body, in this stupid little bed. “I said, Jeeves,” I say, “that sometimes, I wish I had been in that car.”

“Perhaps a drink, sir?”

“No, thank you, Jeeves,” I say. He knows that shuts me up, I think, bitterly. He knows that when I drink, I just laugh and giggle and fall about, and that I don’t have all these feelings, dashed inconvenience as they are. I must be keeping him from his bed. “I know I drink too much,” I say, so that he doesn’t have to. He must be thinking it. That’s uncharitable of me, perhaps. “Dashed awful stuff, but it’s a good palliative, if palliative is the word I mean.”

“Yes, sir,” he confirms. He moves to close the door, and I watch, my mouth dry, as he pushes it closed, with him on this side. We are both in the darkness now, and I can’t see him, and my heart begins to pound in my chest, my mouth dry. Jeeves and I, alone in my bedroom, in the dark, the door closed. My breathing is faster, and my head, oh, how it spins, because will he? Will he? Will he slide into bed beside me, just like Hoggo did, and breathe in my ear, and touch my—

 _No_.

“Jeeves?” I ask, almost panicked, almost hysterical, for I know I cannot voice the thoughts burning into my head, of Jeeves’ heavy body on the mattress beside me, of his warmth, of his strong arms, his broad chest… Oh, _oh!_

“Yes, sir?” he asks: his voice is still beside the door. Relief and disappointment are one pealing bell within my tortured soul.

“That Spinoza chap,” I say. I wasn’t going to tell him. I wasn’t going to. But I want to convince him, at once, that I love him; and I want to convince him that I am not worthy of his love.

“Sir?”

“Dashed complicated,” I say. _I’m an idiot_.

“Yes, sir,” he says. I could die like that, I think. Of tuberculosis. It wouldn’t be so dramatic as a suicide, and that would be better for the family, would make Aunt Agatha far less angry, and I’ve heard it is like drowning, anyway, because your lungs fill up—

“He— Do you know how he died, Jeeves?”

“From a lung illness, sir. Scholars believe it was perhaps tuberculosis, or some similar ailment of the chest.”

“Yes. “But— But I was reading, er, about it, just a little, and they… I read a passage, and it said that— You know, because he made all those telescopes and microscopes and what-not, as well as sort of… Splitting the melon, with the philosophy, and it said that he was probably quite so ill because he’d inhaled all of the dust from the glass. You know, when it was all ground down. And I thought about that, for quite some time, the… Just the thought of it gives one the willies, Jeeves, all those sharp little shards running down one’s throat and sticking sharp about the old breathing apparatus, but I just thought it was so sad, that he should be killed by his… By his life’s work, and whatnot.” I wonder if I sound foolish, that I should say all that. I don’t often talk about literature, properly – even at Oxford, my degree was in music, and I tried to read the books, at times, that my fellow students were reading, those that were studying Literature and loftier subjects, but I never felt like I could keep up, never like I was on the most solid of ground. I felt as if the very word was crumbling beneath me, and that soon I might fall into some abyss of which I knew not, even holding a simple conversation. “He was very young, wasn’t he? When he died, I mean?”

“Forty-four, sir,” Jeeves says. Jeeves is about thirty-something, I think. Imagine _him_ , dying at forty-four. It makes me want to… No. No, it’s too horrible a thought, the idea of Jeeves, _Jeeves_ , dead. Jeeves! _Dead!_

“Yes,” I say. I need him to understand, that I don’t understand it, that I _didn’t_ understand it, that I will never be… “But I— I don’t want to give you the wrong idea, Jeeves. I don’t believe I understood any of it. Of the Spinoza.” I wish I could be. I wish I could be the sort of young man that reads improving books and understands them, but I am not. I remember the desperation I felt last month, reading Spinoza with a dustjacket on from one of my detective novels, a dustjacket that scarcely fit the thick volume, lest someone like Florence Craye ask me if I am a philosopher now, or demand of me why such an unserious man as Bertie Wooster might read a serious book. And what might I have said? Because I adore my valet, and wish I might understand him better, because he reads this stuff as if it sustains him?

“No, sir?” Jeeves asks.

“No. But I— I think, that is to say, I suppose I… It seemed to me, Jeeves, that one of his, er, his percepts, if that is the word I mean—”

“Precepts, sir.”

“Yes, precepts, is that if something is good, er, for people, that is, then it is good. And that if it is bad, in that… In that if it hurts people, it is bad.” I am butchering it. Spinoza had spoken in great long paragraphs, beautiful swathes of test that ran through my head and made my head spin, it was so far beyond my comprehension.

“A clean simplification, sir,” Jeeves says. Ha! _Clean!_ Lord, if only Spinoza might be _cleanly_ simplified.

“And that— The more that you think about something, what, and try to know why you should do something, the better you are. The more… The more active, er, because you understand why you do things, and therefore, you don’t, um, muddy the waters simply by speaking, or putting your foot in it, or whatever.” And that is why, I think, I can never be like Jeeves. Because I do not understand the way that I am, or the way anyone is: my every action is a mystery to me, and I should like to keep all my actions at arm’s length, for they likely say a good deal about me, and I wish I could hide from them. I wish I could hide from all of it, perhaps at the bottom of a river.

“ _Yes_ , sir,” he says emphatically.  “Sir, if I might ask, when did you read Spinoza?”

“Last month,” I say.

“Last month, sir?”

“At Brinkley. I, er— Oh, I hope you won’t nip at me, Jeeves, but I put a dust jacket on the boards, to keep anyone from asking me questions I knew I wouldn’t be able to answer. Not you.” Oh, not you. But I know it sounds foolish, nonetheless, that I should hide my reading of philosophy like I am reading something errant. I feel the need, desperately, to explain: “But... But you know, Aunt Dahlia, they'd tease me awfully if they thought I was trying to read something that complicated. Read the damned thing from cover-to-cover, and I don’t think I understood a word.”

“With respect, sir,” Jeeves says, his voice so gentle and warm I might curl up with it around my neck on a cold winter’s night, sat with Spinoza’s book in my lap, beside the fire. I expect Jeeves is warm. Once more, I think of his fingers on my wrist, lingering there, and my heart aches, seems as if it bleeds in my chest. “I believe you have grasped the central tenets quite well.”

“Only because another several books, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, took the kindness of explaining them to me. And, frankly, Jeeves, I don’t understand how you can treat such things as if they’re, you know, nice, pleasant, bed-time reading. My head ached from it.” And it had, too. It had made my head ache, and while it had throbbed, while my whole skull had screamed with the weight of all this philosophy, I had lain in my bed and admired Jeeves and his unbeatable grey matter, that could digest all this talk of God and Activity and what-not with ease.

“May I ask you a question, sir?” he asks.

Oh. _Oh!_ Here it is, I think. Here it is. The end of my life: the end of everything. He will ask, he will ask, and then I will answer, and he will leave me, or maybe, _just maybe_ , he will stay.

“Yes, Jeeves,” I say breathlessly. “Ask me whatever you like.”

“Why did you spend so much time reading Spinoza, if the subject matter was one you found so difficult to digest?” How could he ask me that? How can he not _know_? How—

“You’re dashed stupid at times, Jeeves,” I say.

“ _Sir!”_

“Oh, I didn’t mean—” He sound so angry. So indignant. I didn’t mean to… I don’t think. I don’t think, I don’t think: I talk and I talk, and when do I think? Like this, in my bed, pathetic and lost in the dark, frightened to cry because my valet will hear me. “Sorry. Sorry. I’m… Merely that I’m tired, Jeeves, I didn’t mean to put it quite so bluntly, what. Just that you tell me often enough, all about this Spinoza chap, and how much you like him, and I’ve even bought you— You know.” _I would do anything for you, Jeeves_ , I want to say, but he knows, and to lend voice to the thought would be too far, would corrupt it, ruin it. _I’m sorry I’m not enough, but I will try, I will try, if you only ask me._ “Just that it seems a silly question, asking why a chap should read a fellow, when you enthuse about said f. all day long and quite a bit of the night as well.”

I wonder what it might be like, to be dead.

I hope it is nothingness.

I couldn’t bear—

No.

No.

And Jeeves… “Are you happy, Jeeves?”

“I believe I told you, sir, I am most satisfied with my position as your valet.” I blink.

“Oh, _that_ , but…” I trail off, unsure how to continue. How do I ask him? How do I say, _I say, Jeeves, I know what you mean, but I’m just trying to ensure you don’t wake up like I do, in the middle of the night, like this. Do you want to die, Jeeves? Do you envision dying alongside your father, however he died? Do you remember what he looked like? Do you ever want to drown? Do you feel like you are drowning? I feel like I’m drowning, Jeeves, I wish I could drown in a non-metaphorical sense, so that it would all come to an end. Do you know what I mean?_ I don’t say any of that. It’s rather a mouthful. “Are you happy, Jeeves? Not— Not with anything. Just. You know. Happy. Content.”

“Yes, sir,” he says, and I sigh softly.

Thank God. Thank the Lord, thank God, thank _Spinoza_ —

“Good, Jeeves,” I say. “Very good.”

“Are you, sir?” he asks. I freeze in my place. My blood is cold. Oh. Oh, how could he, how can _I_ , what—

There’s such quiet in the room.

Such quiet as I have never known, such quiet as I…

“That will be all, Jeeves, thank you,” I say, pressing my face back onto my pillow. “Good night.” He steps toward the door, opens it. Closes it behind him.

I am alone in the silence, and I imagine his body sliding into the bed with me, his breath hot on my neck, one arm slung about my hip, _Jeeves_ … And he wouldn’t touch me like Hoggo did, no, no, but we might lie together, side-by-side, and I would die in his arms, and all would be well.

All would be well, if only…

If only.

If only.

I am exhausted, after all this crying. I fall asleep, and mercifully, I dream no dreams at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some research stuff. I focused mostly on 19th stuff over like, actual opinions in the early 20th century, as I figured Agatha and Dahlia belong to the last generation, and mostly would have put Bertie back and forth between them. The links below are specific, and I was also looking at general sources re: homosexuality in the 19th/20th century, Oscar Wilde's trial notes, and some of Havelock Ellis' research. 
> 
> * _The Solitary Vice: Victorian Views on Masturbation,_ by Mimi Matthews ([x](https://www.mimimatthews.com/2016/05/17/the-solitary-vice-victorian-views-on-masturbation/))
>   
> 
> *  _Masturbation Among Victorian Youth in Boarding Schools,_ by Geri Walton ([x](https://www.geriwalton.com/masturbation-among-victorian-youth-in-board-schools/))
>   
> 
> *  _Why was masturbation such a medical concern in the 19 th century?, _by Jodie Collins ([x](https://jodebloggs.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/why-was-masturbation-such-a-medical-concern-in-the-19th-century/))
>   
> 
> *  _Sex and Sexuality in the 19 th Century, _by Jan Marsh ([x](http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/s/sex-and-sexuality-19th-century/))


	3. Chapter 3

The next day is normal enough.

I go about my day, affect myself with what I might of my appropriately cheerful demeanour, and this seems to meet with Jeeves’ quiet approval.

I approach the day with gusto, and it begins with a plate of the fortifying b., t. and e. of which I am so accustomed: I do feel a good deal better than I had two nights previous, perhaps because I am all cried out, and Jeeves, thank the Lord, makes no mention of it. Now and then, I re-enter the room thinking that perhaps he might hand me his letter of resignation and be done with it, but no such letter is forthright. Forthright? Forthcoming!

After spending an afternoon at the Drones, wherein I spend some time laughing with Bingo Little over a book that I don’t believe he entirely understands, and that I certainly didn’t understand myself, being as a good bit of it was in German, I returned home after dining out, and sat promptly down at the piano.

“Do you play any instruments, Jeeves?” I ask airily as I rummage through the hollow chest in the base of my piano stool, examining various sheets of music that Jeeves keeps meticulously organised by composer, and then by title. Of course, I can usually never remember title _or_ composer, or half the time, exactly how the tune I am looking for goes, so I ordinarily rummage through the whole thing twice or thrice before I find what I am looking for, and inevitably, Jeeves must reorder it.

He doesn’t mind, I don’t think.

He is reordering things now, reorganising some of the books on the bookshelf in the living room and painstakingly dusting them, checking them for bookworm and what not, and ensuring all the new volumes are set in the right order. He often comes and does things in the living room, when I am at the piano, and sometimes, I have noticed, he even props the kitchen door open so that he can hear from in there as well. Not when I’m playing whatever’s most popular at the Drones at the moment (although even then, I notice he flits in and out rather than going off to entertain his attentions with some other task out of earshot), but when I play music of the more classical lilt, if you take my meaning, or when I try my hand at anything jazzy.

I have noticed these things before, but after our discussion the night previous, I feel that perhaps I might linger on the idea, that I might think on it. Jeeves… _likes_ music, I think, as much as he disapproves of so many of my favourites, and he is musically aware himself, of this I know. He can read music quite well, and I think his voice is quite fine, when rarely I hear it. He has a very deep, sonorous baritone which rather makes the soul quiver in its casement, although I scarcely ever hear him break it out.

“Other than the piano, sir?” Jeeves asks, not looking up from his task.

“Er, yes, Jeeves. Sorry. Rather took the old piano for granted.”

“I am somewhat proficient with a guitar, sir,” Jeeves says demurely – I know that, as a rule, if he employs such words as _somewhat_ , he’s usually putting a bit of the modesty on for show, but I rather like Jeeves’ sense for modesty. It suits him really well, much like his neatly-fitted bowler hats, and seeing him bare-headed in the street, as it were, would seem to fit rather ill. “And I have some little skill with the harp, sir, although I confess, I have not so much as looked upon the instrument in a great many years.”

“A _harp_ , Jeeves?” I repeat, transfixed. The idea of this angel of a man astride some instrument of gold gilt and fine strings rather took my imagination away with me: despite the fact of Jeeves’ person, which is broad and strong, he has a delicacy of which a great number are suitably in awe, and to this tenderness, I believe, one can afford the ease with which one imagines him bent at a harp. “Good heavens. Who taught you that?”

“I was a page at a girls’ school for some years in my youth, sir, if you might recall: my first employment, as it happens. I played, at times, to accompany some of the young women as they performed. The aesthetic of a young man in a page’s uniform accompanying their voice appealed, I was told, to the sensibilities of both the girls in question and their parents.”

“I see,” I say. “The Romantic spirit and what-not, eh?”

“Indeed, sir.”

“Gosh. Do you miss it?”

He glances at it me, the dark brow furrowing somewhat. “The school, sir?”

“Oh, no, no,” I say. “No, I can’t imagine one ever missing a girls’ school at all, what with the devilish nature of the girls therein. Not to impugn your workplace of old, Jeeves, but all that business with young Clementina has rather inclined me to believe that young girls are the devil.”

“A not entirely inaccurate summation of their character, sir,” Jeeves says seriously, and I smile.

“No, I meant, er, the harp, what?”

“Not especially, sir,” Jeeves says. My fingers hover over the white expanse of the keys, not yet pressing down, and I lean forward slightly, looking at Jeeves’ shoulders, and at his exquisite profile as he trifles about with a dustcover, trying it to settle straighter than is possible upon one of the books. He is frowning at it most dreadfully, and I wonder sometimes if perhaps he irons them to teach them a lesson for showing creases. I wouldn’t be surprised.

“What, uh, what music do you actually _like_ , Jeeves?” I ask.

Jeeves’ piercing gaze flits to met mine, and I hold my breath, wondering if perhaps I have overstepped in asking this personal question about my valet’s likes and dislikes, especially as, only the night previous, I had ruined what he must expect of me. I was bally well doing my best not to fidget upon the stool when Jeeves finally said, after a thoughtful consideration, “I have no small fondness for the compositions of Arcangelo Corelli, sir. Indeed, I also favour Jean-Baptiste Lully.”

“Oh,” I say. “I shouldn’t have pegged you for a lover of the baroque, Jeeves.” My fingers move over the keys, and I absently play some of the trills from Lully’s _Marche pour la ceremonie des Turcs_ – it’s much better with a proper orchestra, of course, but it’s a good workout for one’s fingers, and I remember I played it often when we had explored the baroque music at Oxford. “I like Lully well enough – I suppose you mourn for the state of _Achille and Polyxène_ , what? Not being finished by the master himself, I mean?”

When I glance back to him, his gaze is on the piano, where my fingers are still idly playing, but when he notices me, he looks up to meet my eyes with his. For a long moment, he stares at me. It’s a rummy sort of stare, not dissimilar to ones he’s given me before, when I’ve come out wearing a corker of a new habitement or what not, but I haven’t put on any accessories since I began my sentence except the charming Wooster grin, to which he is well-accustomed, so it can’t be that.

“Jeeves?” I ask.

Blinking once, as if I have somehow surprised him, I watch in astonished delight as Jeeves’ lips quirk slightly up at their edges, and he smiles. It is a jolly nice style, I think, and one with which the young master is not often faced, unless I outright compliment the chap when he is not expecting it, or when I surprise him with some little thing, like a book I have picked up upon my travels. It’s similar to the smile I see when I allow him to throw out some detested article from my wardrobe, but softer, somehow – it lacks that edge that triumph gives it.

“ _Achille and Polyxène_ is indeed unusual compared to Lully’s previous work, sir,” he says quietly. “It has a melancholy air about it one would not ordinarily expect, and one does wonder what might have been.”

He is still looking at me in that curious fashion, and I look down at the keys, trying to remember the last bit of _Marche_ , and finding that I don’t know what it is. I used to have some Lully at school, but I’ve not any of the sheet music to hand anymore, I don’t think, and as for the Corelli.

“Corelli, Jeeves?” I ask.

“Yes, sir,” Jeeves says.

“I don’t know much Corelli, Jeeves.”

“No, sir?”

“I know _of_ him, of course, but…” I trail off, and then I say, firmly and decisively, “I shall order some of his music arranged for the piano.”

“You needn’t do that on my account, sir,” Jeeves says, but in his mask of neutrality I fancy I see the slightest smidgen of a sign that he is flattered, and I pish-posh his words with a vague wave of my hand.

“Not at all, Jeeves, if he’s as good as Monsieur Lully, what?”

Jeeves gives a very small smile, and he inclines his head. “Indeed, sir,” he says, and I smile back as I look to the keys. It might be odd, I think, that one should care quite as much as I do about keeping one’s valet happy, but I really _do_. A happy household and all that. I know the phrasing is meant to refer one’s wife, and hardly to one’s _gentleman’s gentleman_ , but—

I swallow, and my fingers falter on the keys.

Jeeves glances at me, and I force a laugh to myself, and merrily attempt the bar again.

\---

It rather takes it out of me, that falter at the piano. I’m exhausted, by the time I ought pop off to bed, pyjamaed and dewy-eyed for want of sleep, and the bed is just… too dashed big. The idea of having a smaller one genuinely _is_ comforting, but—

Jeeves does rather pooh-pooh the idea, and I have learned that when Jeeves p.-p.s an i., he is usually (if irritatingly) correct to.

Such as it is.

I can’t stop thinking of him, as the days pass by. I dream, at night, that the two of us dance to Lully, that we dance, _dance_ , some old peasant dance, and we are hand in hand, chest-to-chest. The thought plagues me, and yet it only evolves: soon, we are mouth-to-mouth, and I abhor and loathe myself beyond measure.

\---

Mr Wooster, in the coming weeks, returns to his ordinary mood. I listen carefully at night for any sign that he has risen from his bed, that I might nip such behaviour neatly in the bud, but I do not hear his steps in the hall, nor hear him make any untoward noises during the night. I wonder, despite myself, what he must think to himself, when he shows his cheer. Is he truly so melancholic, so much of the time? Is his contentment naught more than a smokescreen, distracting from his true emotion? The very idea keeps me awake at night, craning my ears that I might catch some snatch of a night-time cry or whimper, that I might hear him rise from his bed.

My master, I muse, has always been somewhat eccentric in his ways.

I knew this in the beginning, when first I selected his name from those available at the agency – mention had been made of him at the Junior Ganymede, and that he went very quickly through valets, each of whom were unwilling to make do with the odd hours he kept, or his peculiarities. They did not care for his playing at the piano, nor the friends he kept; they did not care for his overtly fashionable ways, desperate to remain on trend, nor for his bright and beaming nature; they did not care for the way he avoided affiances as if a wedding ring would kill him.

In short, they disliked that he seemed unlikely to ever make something of himself, without a very firm hand to guide him.

This lack of ambition, I confess, had appealed to me.

Long have I appreciated, in approaching my own work as a valet, to maintain control – as best is possible – over a household, and over the master himself: a gentleman too focused upon ambition will prove unmanageable, as indeed will one committed to indolence. Mr Wooster, I have found, is neither, and as of our night’s discussion…

Mr Wooster, I believe, _would_ fare rather well, were he ever to take up an employment in an appropriate position. He would enjoy it, even, I suspect, and yet to seek out such work would be to damn him…

He does write, of course.

I have even read – quite secretly – some of the novels he has penned, the most of them taking up ridiculous, humorous characters; some, though, are more autobiographical in their nature, and yet of these, I have read only snatches. He has never published anything, but for that essay in Milady’s Boudoir, and yet I do wonder…

But even were he to publish a volume of verse, or a novel, tomorrow, I know that his demeanour would remain unchanged: but for his occasional little rebellions, he would defer to my expertise, to my authority. It is, in equal measure, as things ought be (the young master deferring to greater wisdom and experience; the guiding hand that serves for the better) and as things _ought not_ (the aristocrat giving way to the whims of his valet), and yet I can scarcely feel guilty for it. As important as propriety is, I have always felt comfortable side-stepping it, so long as _appearances_ remain unruffled, and in my service to Mr Wooster, there is scarcely a limit to that which I might do, and yet still escape blame.

He is too trusting, I think.

Despite myself, despite my _reasoning_ for first joining his service: that I should have a master easy to bend to my will, naïve, who should treat me so well, and never think to mistreat me, let alone to mistreat me out of some misplaced want for control… I do care for Mr Wooster. He is a good man, and moreover, he is genuinely kind, which is more than can be said for many of his compatriots. He is thoughtful, and sweet-natured, despite his occasional tendency toward stupidity. I had always thought his naiveté came from a sense of genuine trust in other people – I felt, however ridiculous it may seem, that perhaps he truly believed that all the people he met came from the same place as him, that people were truly _kind_ at heart, that no one should ever wish to take advantage of him. This naiveté was, as one might imagine, infuriating, and yet, equally, it was comforting.

I find myself almost angry at him, now, that he might not believe that.

That is wrong of me, I’m sure: it is selfish, and thoughtless, that I should make another man’s misanthropy my _own_ cross to bear, that I should be so frustrated by it, and yet frustrated I am. Mr Wooster has always come across, to me, as an innocent, to be – on some level – protected, and protect him, I have.

Could it be he never needed my protection, in all that time?

Could it all be an act?

Could he be like _me_ , hiding a secret so dangerous as to make him incapable of true naiveté, and worse than that, hiding…? And hiding what, exactly? The question is wryly asked by the darker voice within my own head, and I sigh quietly as I set the last of the plates on the rack to dry some before I put them away, wiping my hands neatly upon a clean tea towel. It is an ugly day outside, the rain descending in heavy sheets of grey steel, and it buffets the windows, leaving them streaked with water. What is it, _precisely_ , that he is hiding? Melancholia? Is that a crime, now, to be possessed of low spirits?

But to _cry_.

To creep from his room in the middle of the night, and to _cry_ , to weep like a child… He hadn’t wanted my attention, of that, I am sure, and once more I feel a sense of frustration, of anger, that he should escape my notice in these little episodes, that I should never have known. What could possibly ail him so, that he should _weep_? Mumbling about his bed being too small, about the deaths of his parents, long behind him, with his long, lingering glances…

I feel a sickly heat in my stomach, and I take a sip of my tea, tasting the restorative upon my tongue before I brave exiting what Mr Wooster calls my “domain”. And is this not the most curious sign of our relationship, all told, that he should consider part of his own home _my_ territory? That he should think of the kitchen, of my own bedroom, as controlled by another, as if…?

I so dislike to be pensive, and yet pensive I am.

I come from the kitchen, and I look down at him. Mr Wooster is asleep on the Chesterfield, his head reclined against the cushions, and in his left hand is loosely clasped his martini glass; in his right, clutched against his chest, is a little book in cloth-bound boards, and I consider him for a moment.

He hadn’t slept at all, the night before – he had been abroad in London with some of the other young men from the Drones, and having returned home at some time past nine o’clock, had refused point-blank my increasingly pressing suggestions that he ought to his bed. It is now past one o’clock, and it seems that, having lunched, his body has given way to slumber.

Very gently, I draw the glass from his hand setting it on the table, and then I take the book. His hand, full of somnolent petulance, clutches at it as I take it from his grasp, but then his hand drops loosely against his own thigh, and I examine the volume critically. It is one of Agatha Christie’s _Poirot_ books, of which he has been singing praises as of late, and I set it down with the ribbon marking the page.

“Mr Wooster,” I say softly.

He groans, leaning back against the sofa cushions, and then blinks at me blearily.

“Perhaps you ought to bed, sir,” I say, my tones gentle, but firm. I have always been quite adept at delivering commands in the form of a suggestion, and while Mr Wooster sometimes complains about this practice, in his sleepy state, he does no such thing. “You will hurt your neck, sleeping like so.”

“I did think I might stay up, Jeeves,” he mumbles, but he acquiesces, standing to his feet and rubbing at his eye with the heel of his hand. I am struck, in the moment, by how _endearing_ he is: is it any wonder, I wonder, that I feel so compelled to protect him from all that might do him harm? Mr Wooster, I feel, seems to have evolved what I have only ever seen in dogs and cats: big-eyed, floppy-haired, and beatific in his mood, he so engenders in anyone a desire to fuss over him.

Of course, this isn’t true. Most of his fellows, and certainly his relatives, seem to find him as irritating and ridiculous as any family dog.

“Yes, sir,” I say, taking a step back.

“Wish I could be like you, Jeeves,” he says, mumbling the words with his eyes half-closed. “Rising early of morn and what-not.”

“There is hardly any need, sir,” I reply, and I have scarcely finished the sentence before he trips. Where it is over the corner of the rug, or merely over his own feet, I never know. One moment, Mr Wooster is standing uncertainly on his feet, and the next, he is thrown against my breast, his legs unsteady beneath him, his arms clumsily trapped between his chin and my sternum. My arms move to brace him, touching at his shoulders through his creased suit jacket, and for a long, long moment, we stand there.

As soon as a second passes, we are past the lines of what might be _proper_ , and yet I do not push him away even as a second second ticks by, a third. I can smell his hair, smell the sweet scent of his shampoo, and smell the lingering tang of the cocktails he’d drunk last night. I smell fruit juice and grenadine, mixing strangely with vermouth and gin, and I can feel his breaths, slow but shaky against my breast, feel how warm he is.

Oh, I know his secret.

Does he know mine?

He inhales, and my eyes flicker closed, my jaw setting, but I do not drag myself away, nor push him from me. I feel his nose drag over my sternum through the fabric of my clothes (what would that feel like, against my bare skin?), and my mind is awash with desperate imagery, of Mr Wooster upon his knees before me, or I before him; of the two of us entwined, locked in a lover’s embrace; of Mr Wooster without vestment or shadow, the planes of his body bared for the pleasure of my viewing…

“Dashed good cologne, Jeeves,” he says, in some pretence of innocence. Or perhaps it isn’t pretence at all: perhaps he has never, as I have, had a man in his arms, that he might smell _precisely_ what a man smells like, that he might engage—

This is an ugly train of thought.

Had I not just been musing, with such fondness, on how innocent my employer is, how naïve? What manner of monster am I? It is one thing, to take advantage of Mr Wooster’s good nature: it is one thing, to take holidays, and to fish, and to line my pockets in the aftermath of some scheme… _This_ would be another manner entirely. I taste the bitterness in my mouth, and I raise my chin. And if it _is_ an act? If this is all feigned innocence?

“I don’t wear cologne, sir,” I say stiffly.

For one second more, we remain like so, Mr Wooster pressed tight against me, and then he scrambles back, heaving in a gasp and looking at me with wide, desperate eyes, the blue shining with colour. He looks dishevelled, in his mussed clothing, with such a blush on his thin cheeks: he looks as if I _have_ kissed him, and then where would we be?

“Sorry, Jeeves,” he says hurriedly, and he stares down at the carpet instead of meeting my gaze. “Still a bit gone in the head, I think, what with the drink and lack of sleep besides.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. My tone is harder than I mean it to be, and for just a moment, Mr Wooster’s expression crumples, and I think he will cry, that he will burst into tears like a _child_ —

He doesn’t. His eyebrows raise, as if acting as the puppet masters for his lips, forcing their corners up at their edges on invisible strings, and he smiles. It is a fragile smile, liable to shatter at any moment, but the veneer of cheer serves almost to infuriate me, and I wish I could kiss him just to wipe that faux-brightness from his face, bite it from his lips and leave him gasping in my arms, begging— “To my bed, I think,” he says brightly, his lower lip quivering just slightly.

“Yes, sir,” I agree, and I lead him down the corridor, to his bedroom. It doesn’t matter, I counsel myself, whether he is naïve or not, whether he is deceptive or not, whether he _wants_ , or not: I am still his valet, his gentleman’s gentleman, and no matter how handsome he might be, no matter how much I might care, _no matter_ …

I will not stoop to the basest service.

“Oh, you needn’t, ah, you needn’t—”

My fingers are already on the dark cloth of his tie, ignorant of his protests, undoing it with a deftness he has never been capable of himself. This is _normality_ , and I will pursue it as I ought, undressing him for bed. He is staring up at me, and I see the ghost of uncertainty, of fear, in his face. _Fear_? Of _me_? The very idea—

I set my jaw, and I set his cravat neatly aside with a stiffly held hand, moving to undo his rumpled jacket and draw it from his shoulders. I feel overcome with my viciousness, shame overtaking me, and yet I do not stop the movements I make to get him undressed, ignoring the way he trembles beneath my touch: gentle, but not soft, for I am his _valet_ , and nothing more – nor anything lesser.

“You really needn’t—” My fingers move down over his chest, unbuttoning his shirt buttons, and I hear him gasp threadily. His cheeks are so red he looks as if someone’s slapped him, and he looks as if he is on the verge of tears once more, his lips parted, his expression… His hand catches my wrist as I unbutton the part of his shirt over his navel, and I look at his face.

“Sir?” I ask.

“Sorry, Jeeves,” he says in a whisper. “I just feel very… I feel quite faint. Might I sit down?”

I hold his gaze. He hardly needs my permission, and yet he waits for it, seeming dizzy on his feet, and I think of last night, when he commanded me to get out, and I ignored him: shame cascades down the insides of my rib cage, as if my heart itself has burst. “Of course, sir,” I say quietly, and I gently ( _softly_ ) set my hand beneath his elbow, supporting him to take his seat at the side of the room.

His breath hitches as he inhales, and my gaze flits to his knees, which are pressed so tightly together one might think him endeavouring to have one give way to the other, and crumble. He looks up at me, beseechingly, his eyes seeming to beg for something, and I ignore it, for there is nothing I might give Mr Wooster that he should beg for.

I lean in, to unbutton the rest of his shirt, and he flinches away from me. I stop.

“You needn’t,” he says, a third time, weakly. “I can do it, Jeeves.”

I reach forward, unbuttoning the last of his shirt, and he doesn’t flinch away this time, but trembles. Slowly, I fall to a crouch, reaching for the laces of his shoe, and he _yelps_ like a struck dog, jumping up from the chair and scrabbling away from me, falling back against the wall. I hear the loud _thump_ of his shoulders there, and I hear his ragged, desperate gasp: his eyes are closed tightly, his hands clenched into fists, his elbows drawn in against his body. He releases a choked noise, and his legs fail him, dropping him to the floor in the corner of the room.

Drowned in my guilt, and looking through it like a veil about my shoulders, I stare down at him.

\---

I am dying, I think.

I cannot breathe.

I try, try as best I can to force my struggling lungs to _breathe_ , to shift inwards like they always do, and yet they won’t, they won’t, and I am _dying_ , and I will _die_. I cannot, it seems, remember how this whole lung business works, what with the inhaling and the exhaling, and the shape of the mouth, how do I usually do it? How do I? I don’t know! I don’t know! My own bedroom feels like some nebulous mass of encroaching shadows, and the walls are tightening in toward me: my hands, scrambling wildly, grab at the carpet and then I grasp at my own thigh, digging hard into the flesh—

Jeeves’ hands are warm on my wrists, and I let out a whimper-but-not-a-whimper, it’s too loud for that, but I shudder to call it a scream, I shudder—

“No,” I say, “no, Jeeves, don’t, you mustn’t touch me, you mustn’t, I oughtn’t—” And yet I want to, don’t I? It burns in me like a hunger, the want to lean into Jeeves and beg him to never let me go, and I ache with the awful _guilt_ of it all, of looking at Jeeves and his smartly-made-up hair and want to muss it, or to—

Oh, it is unbearable.

When I tripped, but a few minutes ago ( _it feels like years ago, years! Centuries! Eons!)_ , and buried my face in his chest, why, the very _scent_ of him… Musky and assured, and not at all like a woman’s perfume, nor even like any cologne I’ve ever scented, and yet I thought it must be, I thought it must be, for how could a man smell so _good_? If Spinoza is right, and God is in all things, why should a man smell so dashed delightful, and make one want to lie upon his breast and die there?

I am panicking, I think, in a sort of distant way. I am letting out the most dreadful of noises, and I feel scarcely cognizant of them. This has happened before, but never _in front_ of someone, never, never, never, never—

“Jeeves, Jeeves, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” And I should be sorry, shouldn’t I? A man can’t go about, entertaining thoughts of molesting his valet, of kissing his mouth, of offering him sweet nothings: it is _madness_ , and I know not what has gotten into me, of late. It is as if Jeeves catching me has made it impossible for me to truly _hide_ from him, and I cannot bear it, cannot bear it as I try to force air into my lungs, and it doesn’t _work!_

I don’t know if my vision blurs for tears or lack of oxygen.

Jeeves is grasping me very tightly, and he’s holding my wrists in a vice-like grip, that I not be able to grasp at my thighs: he’s dragged me up against his chest, and I can feel his knees either side of my body, keeping me as still as they might, although I tremble, tremble awfully, I can’t stop _shaking_ …

I can feel my heartbeat in my ears, my wrists, my ankles, the pound of it punching through where the skin is thin, and I sob out a noise as Jeeves grasps at both of my wrists with one of his broad, capable hands. The other touches against my neck, and I jump, because I was thinking about it, and he must know, must _know_ , else why should he look at me with so hard a gaze?

His fingers slide down to the pulse point at my throat, and I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t—

“One,” he whispers in my ear. “Two. Three. Four. Five. One—”

“What are you _doing_?” I choke out, from a mouth that won’t work, dry and aching, and my chest hurts, and I will _die_ —

“Two. Three. Four. Five.”

It’s almost hypnotic. He does it again, and again, resolutely, counting through it in his low, dulcet tones, and I don’t know when it begins to work, but it _does_ , and it’s almost as if as soon as I forget my lungs don’t work, they begin to. A bit like the business of a clock that doesn’t seem to tick at all, until you get distracted, and then suddenly two hours have gone past, you know?

I sprawl like a fish on the carpet, gasping in a sort of distant, half-forgotten way. My head is against Jeeves’ chest, my legs thrown out before me, and still, he’s holding me very, very tightly, his hand over my wrists, his knees against my hips… He’s quite a bit bigger than me. I knew this, of course, but the knowledge that your companion is bigger than you becomes a lot more real, when his body is wrapped around your body, and pinning you down to keep you from hurting yourself as you have some manner of fit.

I swallow, hard.

He’s stopped counting. I don’t know when he did, but he has.

His nose, I realize, is pressed right into my hair. I can feel him breathing in and out, smooth and slow and easy, brushing over the top of my head, and I can feel his heart beating just beneath my ear. It was running very fast, but it’s beginning to slow now, and I wonder how much bigger it is than my heart, when Jeeves is a much bigger man.

When he unbuttoned my jacket, I thought about—

And when he was on his knees…

“I wouldn’t have,” I say, I promise, I beg him to believe me. “I wouldn’t have, but I was so frightened that I would, Jeeves, and I know that would be, that I couldn’t, and I would never have, I would never—”

The hand that is against my throat rises higher, and I feel my lips stop moving as Jeeves’ palm settles overtop of them. He doesn’t press down hard with it, just holds his hand over my mouth, his fingers against my cheek, and I can smell dish soap and silver polish, and feel the callouses on his palm press tight against my jaw.

“I do not know, sir,” he says quietly, in a very measured voice, “what it is you’re talking about. I would not presume to know what you would or would not do, Mr Wooster, nor would I pass judgement one way or the other.” I close my eyes, and without meaning to, I think about how very warm his hand is. “Are you going to harm yourself if I let you go, sir?”

I shake my head.

“I’m sorry that I frightened you,” Jeeves says lowly, in a voice so heavy with regret it makes my _heart_ hurt.

His palm comes away, and I say, “You _didn’t_. You didn’t frighten me, Jeeves, you _couldn’t_ frighten me, I a— You couldn’t frighten me, Jeeves, never, not ever. Were you appointed my executioner, Jeeves, you couldn’t frighten me even then.” I breathe in, shakily, and I am so aware of Jeeves’ body against my own, of my body against his, of his knees and my hips, of his chest and my back, of his hand enclosing mine, his other loosely upon my shoulder. When his fingers dance against my neck, I shiver. “But I— Oh, Jeeves, I am black-hearted.”

“No, sir,” Jeeves says.

“I _am_.”

“No, sir.”

“You will hate me, Jeeves,” I say wretchedly.

“No, sir,” Jeeves replies evenly. “ _Never_ , sir.”

“I wanted to… Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, I never meant to, I never…”

Jeeves is silent, and I turn in his arms, bury my face once more against his chest, feel him stiffen, but he does not draw away from me. I inhale his scent, fill my lungs to the brim with him, and he does not shove me away, but _holds_ me. His hands settle, one on the back of my head, the other on the centre of my spine.

“I understand,” I say, “if you should… t-tender your—”

“No, sir,” Jeeves says patiently, interrupting me smoothly. “Never, sir.”

“But, Jeeves, I am _wicked_ , you have no idea—”

Jeeves’ fingers grip tight at the back of my hair, and I choke out a whimpered noise as he draws my head back. I stare into his eyes, his hard gaze, his set jaw, and I feel as if every hint of moisture dissolves all at once from my tongue, it becomes so abruptly dry. My gaze flits down to the handsome line of his lips, sculpted as if from marble, and I swallow hard.

“You mustn’t,” I say. “Oh, Jeeves, I can’t, I never—”

His eyes narrow. He stares at me as if I am some sort of dashed complicated crossword in the paper, as if he can scarcely make head nor tail of me, and I exhale.

“Jeeves,” I say despairingly, desperately, “I can’t _ever_ be married. Don’t you understand me? Not ever. I won’t ever.”

“No, sir,” he says. “Nor I.”

“ _No_ , Jeeves,” I say. “No, Jeeves, you don’t understand—”

“ _Yes_ , sir,” Jeeves says. “I do.”

I feel as if I’ve been thrown into some freezing ocean. The Baltic, or the Arctic, or whichever one that I mean. I feel as if the cold water is seeping into my very bones as I stare at him. My hands are still fisted in his shirt front, and I remain half-undressed. Our gazes stay locked together. “But,” I object, unable to stop my treacherous tongue, “but you… But you’re so _handsome_. You can’t be… I never…”

“Mr Wooster,” Jeeves says quietly, his hands settling loosely on my shoulders, “you _must_ go to bed.”

I am exhausted. I can feel it weighing down my very bones, feel myself ready to faint in Jeeves’ arms, let myself fall beneath the wondrous scent of him, but he doesn’t let me. As if in a dream, I let him undress me for bed, put me in my pyjamas, deposit me beneath the sheets. I reach out for him before he can pull away, tangle our hands together, our fingers. His hand is so much harder than mine is, his palms rough, but not so much as to be unpleasant, just—

Different.

We don’t speak, for a long moment, and then I draw my hand back, settling it on the mattress. “Never, Jeeves?” I ask in a whisper.

“Never, sir,” he answers.

“You ought.”

“No, sir.”

“Will you stay? With me? Just— Just for a few moments, I—”

He moves across the room, and I press my face against the pillow, drowning in my shame, but then I hear the soft shift of the chair as he drags it across the carpet, setting it down at my bedside. I hear the wood quietly creak as he sits down, and I look up at him in the dim, dismal daylight that manages to fight its way past the rain, so that it can filter wanly through the curtains.

I look at him, sitting straight-backed in the chair, his hands loosely folded in his lap, and I am comforted by his mere presence, as much as I am by the blanket. There’s a cold sweat lingering on my skin, from my episode, when I’d…

But I can’t bathe now. Later. Later.

“Thank you, Jeeves,” I mumble. “Don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

He says nothing, and I feel myself drift.


	4. Chapter 4

_“Don’t know what I did to deserve you_ ,” he says. The words seem to echo in the soft light of Mr Wooster’s bedroom, and I look at him laid prone in his bed, his head reclined against his soft pillow, his eyelids loosely closed, his jaw slack. His hair, a muss of messy curls, seems to alight on the pillow as blossoms on grass, and he looks so supremely peaceful that one could almost forget that a few minutes ago he was ripping apart at his seams, gibbering and scarcely able to breathe in the very corner of the room, choking on scant air. I cannot quite control the desperate shiver of my own hands, trembling in their place upon my knees, although I had managed to force my breathing to tranquillity as I held him pinned.

What he did to deserve _me!_

By God, by every saint, the guilt is tearing at my insides, turning about in its place like a rabid dog and ripping at all within reach. How could I have done that to him? So intent upon completing our interactions as usual, so focused as I was on ignoring my own unacceptable urges that I ignored, too, my master’s increasingly palpable anxiety, and to see him _fall_ , to see him—

I don’t believe I shall ever be able to close my eyes again without being struck with the hammer blow of the sight of him, of Mr Wooster curled up like a child on the floor, his face in his knees, grasping so desperately at his own golden hair. It is a cutting thought, and I have to concentrate on keeping my breath slow and easy, even as I feel sharp, painful heat pinprick at the edges of my eyes.

Reaching up, I delicately dab at the corner of each traitorous eye, drawing away the moisture before it can well up properly. Men do not weep in such a way.

How could I?

What manner of man am I, Reginald Jeeves, that I should provoke such a break of composure, such an emotional collapse, in the man to whom I might claim loyalty? Is that not so? Have I not declared myself time and time again a devoted valet, focused upon Mr Wooster’s health and happiness?

Why then, should I torture him so, and go on breathing?

I watch him sleeping, slightly fitful in his place, his breathing slow in sleep, but occasionally, his body shifts, spasms. Is he dreaming, I wonder, of me? Of my cruelty, my cold-heartedness, my callousness?

Certainly, I have been cold with him before – I have been petty in making my point on more than one occasion, as so often I am, for I know my temper to be more unwieldy than many men’s, and know myself to be an angry man at my core; certainly, I have been callous, at times, and perhaps too cruel in one humiliation laid upon my master’s shoulders or other, have enjoyed evoking laughter at his expense, but—

But this.

Oh, but this.

“ _I am black-hearted!”_

As if he could ever be.

As if Mr Wooster were truly capable of real black-heartedness, as if he could ever be as cruel and cold as I myself can be, as if he could ever even conceive of the true sadism allotted to man’s darkest hearts, as if he could ever be _bad_. He is a beautiful thing, a naïf, no matter how much he might protest the term, and yet I’ve broken that shell somewhat today, have I not?

I have told him, now.

I have admitted to him the inversion in my nature, and how his face changed, not displaying horror, not displaying the joy at finding in another man a kindred spirit, but displaying utter, utter shock, as if the idea of me, Jeeves, an invert, was so unthinkable as the sky being made of dyed marmalade, or that the seas were but treacle.

I wanted to kiss him, in that moment.

How could I? How _could_ I?

Feeling his trembling body leaned back against my chest, his cheeks streaked with tears of my making, his hands grasping at me with a weak-fingered hold, his eyes as blue as I have ever seen them, I was _tempted_. I saw his eyes flit down to my mouth, and I felt my very body rush in an excited wave: _he wants you, kiss him, kiss him! Defile your master before the eyes of God, and show him precisely what it is he aches for!_

I glance down at my palms, and see the way the flesh of them is being pressed down by the grip of my own fingers, clenched into such tight fists as they are. He knows, now, that we are each inverts, but what now ought be done?

Mr Wooster is not some other black-hearted man, encountered in the darkness and kissed and fondled; he is not some criminally-minded fellow like myself, prone to such secrecy. He is… He is too good, for such degradation, and were he to find himself amongst others like himself, I know, he would be taken advantage of, worse even than he is by the women which try their hardest to marry him.

And yet he seems…

Crying in the night. Shivering at so much as being touched. What is it he thinks, I wonder, about the nature of his inversion, or indeed, of mine? I have never believed it is truly a broken thing in any of us, no matter the common parlance: it may be better kept behind closed doors, but were any of us truly flawed in this attraction, I don’t believe we would have been made this way.

And yet Mr Wooster shows such terror, such horror—

Is it at I alone? That he wonders I should take advantage of him?

But no…

Surely, _surely_ , Mr Wooster doesn’t believe _he_ might take advantage of _me_?

I use him so often, and so easily, I cannot help but wonder how much he would hate me, if he ever stopped to think about it. Do I not bully him, one way or another, that we might take a holiday of my liking? Does it matter that he enjoys such things, when my benefit is what drives me? Do I not pad my pockets with tips from his friends, and indeed from Mr Wooster himself? Have I not benefitted in a thousand ways from my service to him? Is this not the very reason I chose him in the first place, that he might be easy to take advantage of, to use at my leisure, to draw one way or another?

I ought leave.

The thought settles in me like heavy brick, inescapable, derailing my every attempted train of thought: I ought go, and never return, that he might get hold of a proper valet, who would serve his needs, who would not take advantage, as I have, and yet, where should such a man be found? How could I entrust Mr Wooster to another, knowing him as I do?

Particularly with this, the nature of his desires… What, then, were he to be blackmailed? What then?

I feel the instinct to leave before he wakes make itself known, to remove myself as far as I might from his presence, to leave the ink on my letter of resignation drying where I leave it upon his piano, and leave him to peace, but what peace? What peace could I find, away from him – and moreover, what peace might _he_ find, worrying that I might tell all about his fatal flaw? What fear he would feel, what upset, at losing his valet!

When, I wonder, had Mr Wooster’s anxieties become so close to my own heart? When had I fallen so entirely into his feelings – more than taking care of Mr Wooster’s likes and dislikes, his preferences and natural avoidances, I have fallen into caring for his _deepest_ emotions, and how? Why?

And if I stay…

And if I stay, then what? He does not wish to be married, not ever, and I know him better than I should like, at times: he would not be able to marry merely for the sake of obligation, and more than that, I would not care to let him. I care too much for him to let him submit himself to such pain, to such torture, and is that not wrong? Is that not a disservice to my loyalty to him, that my understanding of propriety be so easily eclipsed by my love, not for a good position or a steady pay, but for the man who allots them to me?

I am all I promised myself I would never be.

I am his _valet_ , I remind myself. His valet, his gentleman’s gentleman: nothing more, and nothing less. I could not take advantage of him in this way, and moreover, for my professional pride, I could not allow him to make use of me, and yet—

How could he use me? How could he do so much as try, so foolish as he is?

Why can’t I?

Why _can’t_ I? Even within my own head, they are the words of a petulant child, and I emit a very slow, quiet sigh.

There will be suspicions, if I stay forever. Even those that would never suspect the nature of my master’s inversion, with how readily he appears to pursue women, however unluckily, they would suspect _me_ , his valet, lingering at his side for decade after decade… Lady Worplesdon would certainly make an objection, no matter the lacking veracity in such suspicions, no matter than he and I are not… involved.

And how easy might it be, I wonder, to _become_ involved?

How easy might it be to—

I look at him, his face beatific in soporific peace, even with reddened cheeks cooling to their usual colour, his breathing even. He is so beautiful as to harken back through the ages, the sort of man upon whose beauty divine battles are waged, and he scarcely seems aware of it. He calls me handsome often, regularly talks on the “finely-chiselled” nature of my features, and yet of himself, I could not say what he thinks.

What _do_ I know of what he thinks, in any case? Do I know aught at all?

I sit for hours, drowning in a sea of unwanted thoughts, concerns, uncertainties, until I rise to force some meal I barely taste down my throat, and then I wander the flat, tidying things that do not need tidying, dusting clean surfaces. At five o’clock, I run the young master a hot bath, and I proceed to gently wake him, drawing open the curtains while there is yet light, and I watch him stir sleepily in his place, yawning as he sits up and squints about the room.

“I have taken the liberty of running you a bath, Mr Wooster,” I say quietly. “It is half-past five o’clock, that you might be able to sleep at a reasonably hour this evening.”

“Oh,” Mr Wooster mumbles, and I see the moment where he recalls the circumstances in which I put him to bed, his expression stuttering and freezing as he leans forward, his eyes widening as he looks to me. “Er. Yes. Jeeves. A… a bath.”

He stands on shaky feet, and I lead him through to the bathroom, setting a towel upon one of the radiators so that it might be warm when he rises from his ablutions, and I lay out his things on the small table beside the bath, as well as a steaming cup of tea. I move to the door, then, to tidy his bedroom as I leave him to it, but I hear him say in a quavering voice, “Jeeves?”

“Sir?”

“My— Oh, don’t… Never mind.” I turn to look at him where he is standing beside his bath, and I follow his gaze to his hands, which are trembling violently, the long, graceful fingers spasming in his anxiety.

“Would you like me to help you with your nightshirt, sir?” I ask, doing my best to keep my voice crisp, and entirely lacking in the uncertain emotion I feel.

“I can’t make them stop, Jeeves,” Mr Wooster whispers, as if confessing some dreadful crime, and I take a few steps forward, my fingers moving to the top button of the article in question and beginning to delicately unbutton it. The fabric is damp with cold sweat, and even were it not for Mr Wooster’s anxious nerves, I would not be surprised if he shivered regardless: I ought not have let him to sleep in such a state, and I bite by tongue to keep myself from apologising, lest what precisely I am apologising for be misconstrued. “Jeeves,” he says, all but breathing out the words. “Do you think I’m very dreadful?”

“Not at all, sir,” I say in a delicate fashion, measuring out my words with great care. “You are a very generous employer, and a very kind man.”

“Do you— Is a man still good, do you think, if he has the most awful thoughts, but doesn’t act on them?”

“A man can only be judged by his actions, sir,” I murmur, doing my best not to concentrate on the soft drizzle of golden hair that settles on my master’s chest, scarcely more than the soft fuzz that settles on the flesh of a peach, catching a shine in the warm light in the bathroom. “To weigh his morals on his thoughts alone would eliminate the crucial factor of his choices. There are a great many men who are selfish at heart, but act nobly in spite of their basest instincts; there are others still who know that what they do is wrong, but allow themselves to be swept up in the pressure of the moment, or the peers they are surrounded by.”

Mr Wooster has stopped breathing. He is looking up at me with his lips slightly parted, his eyes wide and full of focus, and I watch the slight bob of the apple in his throat as he swallows, watch the delicate shift of his collarbones, of that soft, taut skin.

“I hate myself at times, Jeeves,” Mr Wooster says, blurting out the words as if he is trying to rid himself of them before someone sees him holding them, and I carefully withdraw my hands from his pyjama shirt, now unbuttoned. “I want to— Oh, do you ever wish that you were a Catholic?”

There are times at which my master’s thoughts are so elastic and quick-moving that even I, as accustomed as I am with his manners of perception and philosophy, struggle to follow them. “A Catholic, sir?” I repeat.

“You know, they confess things, don’t they, to priests? And then they aren’t… _weighted_ by them, did you say? They must be so much lighter, after that.”

Some of my cousins, who are of the Catholic church, have often noted to me the benefits of confession, but in speaking with them I don’t believe I have ever noted them to be lighter of spirit than anyone else – in their aspect, I find them even more tended to anxieties over their behaviours (or, indeed, those of others) to be even more exaggerated than most. I consider, for a moment, the value in offering this observation to Mr Wooster. But then, it is not the _Catholicism_ of which he cares: it is the act of confession, the act of unburdening oneself of one’s concerns, the act of sharing the load one bears with another, and this—

“There is perhaps something in it, sir,” I allow. Whatever it is he would confess, I know that I could not bear to hear it, and yet I look at his face, the taught lines of desperate worry and anxiety in it, the way that he trembles… I cannot bear to see him like this, so brought down, and because of _me_ , because of what _I_ have done to him, needling at already fragile nerves, having not cared enough to notice before, that he should be able to hide it from me— “Of course, sir, people do make confessions to their valets.”

“Oh, I couldn’t— couldn’t do that to you, old fruit,” Mr Wooster says.

I notice, with a sort of strange, giddy understanding, that not even for a moment does he imply trust would be a worry, that he might worry I should share his secrets with another. Indeed, is there not a binding tie between us, now that he knows I will no longer divulge his happenstances in the Ganymede book? I promised to never leave him, did I not? And he believes me, believes that I would never… He worries only that _his_ burdens would burden me.

“You would hate me,” he goes on.

“I would not, sir.”

“You would really— I couldn’t look at you,” he says.

“I might face the other way,” I say slowly.

“Oh,” he whispers. “Oh.”

We stand there, for a long moment, in the quiet together, and he glances to the steaming water before his trembling hands go to loosely grasp at the fronts of his pyjama shirt, drawing it tremulously over his shoulders and baring lean, lightly-muscled shoulders and arms. Mr Wooster is a gangling sort, but he is not so skinny as to appear unhealthy or ill-fed: merely that he is long of limb and lacking in the requisite grace to manoeuvre said limbs with ease of co-ordination. He can be graceful, at times, but I sometimes think he overthinks the very act of moving from one place to the next, and thus curses himself.

I tear my gaze away from the light spatter of freckles across his shoulders, and I reach for the other stool, setting it at the head of the bath, where so often I sit, getting on with small errands as my master bathes, and yet, now, sitting neatly upon it, and facing the other way—

The air feels charged, and thick with steam. I hear the rustle of his pyjama trousers as they fall to the ground, and I close my eyes tightly. Ordinarily, I would move back to pick up the pyjamas, to neatly fold them and set them aside, but I do not move, now, remaining frozen in my place.

“Shut the door, would you?” Mr Wooster asks, and I hear the soft disturbance of water as he slips into the bath. “There’s a draught.”

There is, from the window I opened in his bedroom, to air it out some. He isn’t wrong. And yet for a moment, I hesitate, my eyes closed as I face the open door. How many times, I wonder, have I been with him while he takes his bath, caught glimpses of his body, of the beautiful curves of his backside or his thighs, the muscle in his well-formed calves, of his prick, soft and pretty, crowned with golden hair?

How many times? Why, now, should I struggle with the task allotted to me?

I rise, and I shut the door without turning, before settling back upon my seat. Behind me, I imagine Mr Wooster leaning back in his bath water, his head resting against the back of the bath, his hands beneath the water…

I swallow.

\---

As I slowly slip beneath the water, I feel the hot slosh of it against my skin, and for the first time since I clumsily fell out of bed a few minutes ago, I feel as if there may finally be an end to all the shivery-quivery business my body is getting up to, and has not yet been convinced to set down. Sinking further down, I lie back until my chin drops under the surface of the water, feeling the steaming heat of it prickle at my skin.

It’s a bit hotter than I like it, actually, but I certainly didn’t wish to say so, didn’t want to fuss about talking about the temperature when we were already onto this confession business. One could hardly jump about on one’s toes, bumbling on about one’s bathwater being a bit over, when one’s valet was saying, “Oh, yes, Mr Wooster, of course I’ll listen to you go on about your darkest secrets and whatnot.”

I hear the door click shut, and I exhale, taking up my sponge and lathering a little bit of the old lavender soap onto it, scrubbing it upon my flesh, over my arm, and I say, “Do you think this is a dashed stupid idea, Jeeves?”

“Not if it brings you peace, sir,” Jeeves says, his tone measured.

“I’m sorry if I frightened you earlier,” I babble thoughtlessly, scrubbing my arms just a little bit too hard. My heart is beating fast in my chest as I go on, “I didn’t mean to, and I know it was very silly of me, merely that I got rather carried away, and I got so— I didn’t mean to get so upset, Jeeves, and it was good of you, you know, to…” _To hold me_. _To hold me like you weren’t ever going to let me go, and I felt so dreadfully safe, Jeeves, in your arms, I wish I could stay in your arms forever, Jeeves, I should happily die between a pair of arms like yours, if you wouldn’t mind making a note of it_. “You’re very good to me, Jeeves.”

Jeeves says nothing, and I start onto the other arm, scrubbing at that one instead. It stings a bit, but I kept going regardless, rubbing at the skin just a little bit hard.

“I— I don’t know what to say,” I mumble. I’ve wanted to tell Jeeves a thousand things in the past few week – in the past ever – and yet now my tongue feels dry and barren, left without shoot or fruit upon it. “Jeeves, will you— How did you… How can you…?”

I swallow.

“You are asking, perhaps, that I share with you a secret, that you might feel more comfortable divulging one of your own?” His voice is, as ever, smooth and low and easy, not showing even the slightest bit of tension, and I think of being sprawled back in his arms, having to wrench my gaze away from his handsome mouth.

“That’s too much to ask,” I mumble. “I’m sorry, I, ah, I…”

“It is not,” Jeeves says quietly. “Merely that it is not in the nature of our professional relationship, sir, that I divulge such things to you. These separations are traditional, lest the lines of our relationship become confused: I remain, ever and always, your servant, sir.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” I say without thinking, and I almost imagine I can _hear_ his back stiffening, his neck going straight. “No, no, Jeeves, merely that I wish we might be friends, you know.”

Again, silence.

I look down at my forearms, which are red with the attentions of the hot water and my hard-lathering sponge, and then begin to render the same attentions upon my legs instead. A curious nausea seems to have insinuated itself within my belly like some octopus, its tentacles squeezing various organs in turn, and probably having a grand old time in the process.

“The first time,” Jeeves says, his voice low, “that I touched another boy, we were each of us sixteen. I was a junior footman, and he was the son of the head gardener. His name was Piers, and he used to assist some of the gamekeepers in their duties – he knew all the secret dips and ditches, and he took me into one of them, laid me down in a copse amidst a thicket of blooming lavender. I don’t believe I’ve ever smelt so sweet as I did that day.”

The water suddenly seems scarcely lukewarm in comparison to my own body, for I feel as if I have been lit aflame from within, and I feel the hitch of my breath in my own throat as I press my knees tightly together, trapping my soapy hand between them. My soap is lavender, and I inhale, taking in the scent of it, imagining that smell clinging to the inimitable form of my man Jeeves, imagining him laid out among flowers—

I press my legs yet tighter together, and I feel myself stiffen slightly, feel the blood rush downward as I grit my teeth, doing my best to focus my errant mind elsewhere. “H— But, but, you— first time…? You don’t mean to tell me you’ve touched— Oh, but…” I cannot best formulate my thoughts, my every word bubbling from my mouth, and I heave in a little gasp, shifting in the water. But he had told me a secret, hadn’t he? And yet, oh, my mind, how fast it works to imagine it, Jeeves lying in flowers, Jeeves, being touched— Oh, no. Oh, no, no…“I… Ah. Aren’t you worried for your— for your health?”

“My health, sir?” Jeeves repeats.

“You know, er, it’s dreadful for you, isn’t it? You know, makes you wither quite away and get thin and lifeless, and it can cause consumption, and make you ill.”

I hear the shift of Jeeves’ suit as he turns to look at me. “What does, sir?” he asks, sounding… I know not what to make of his tone. He sounds surprised, and curious.

“ _You know_ ,” I mutter.

“No, sir,” Jeeves said.

“You _do_. Self— Self-abuse. The lonely act.”

There is a moment’s pause, and then Jeeves says, “Sir, with the greatest of respect, I believe you to be incorrect. There are no health deficits associated with masturbation with which I am accustomed, unless one’s focus upon the act is obsessional. No more than with any other act of intimate union with another.”

“But that’s bad for your health, too,” I say, feeling a hot flush burn up my neck and the underside of my jaw, glowing from my cheeks. “One mustn’t—” I delicately cough, and do my best not to sputter. “One mustn’t engage, er, with one’s wife too often, even when one is married, lest one become drained.”

Silence.

And then, Jeeves says, in the most delicate tone I have ever heard him employ, “Mr Wooster, outside of disease or injury, I know no reason why the intimate act ought be bad for one’s health, and two former, to my knowledge and experience, are best avoided with the proper selection of one’s partner, and so long as one does not take too much haste.”

“Well, you’re wrong, Jeeves,” I say. “It’s terrible for you, such things, it’s— It’s _terrible_. A man might wither away and die, indulging in such things too often, it’s _awful_.”

“No, sir.”

“Well, Jeeves, and there I thought you knew everything!”

“I do not, sir,” Jeeves says. “But I have experience with the act, and know others more experienced than myself, and never have I noticed a draining of the humours, as you imply. I am aware that many gentlemen of the aristocracy are informed of the health risks associated with Onanism, but whilst I am no man of science, sir, my own research would imply these risks are greatly exaggerated.”

I _ache_. I can feel myself, stiff as a board against my own thighs, and I clench my hands into tight, tight fists as I shift uncomfortably in the water. I have grown accustomed to trusting Jeeves’ judgement, where my own falls short, but how can I believe him, when I have been told for so long—

And yet, at Eton, the other boys did touch themselves. I never heard of anybody wasting away, or growing ill from such a disease, and yet I feel nauseated, ill, at the prospect of touching myself, when it is so _very_ wrong—

“When I was at Eton, Jeeves, a boy, he— He crawled into my bed, of a night, slipped in behind me and wrapped his arms about he. He was so dashed warm I felt I had invited a tea cosy into bed, and then he— he touched me, between my le— he sort of, ah, he cupped me, and I thought I would die, Jeeves, the world was so narrowed down to that fine, hot tension within my very core, and the rest of the world was dark. But I was so dashed frightened. You know, that he was a man, and that he should— my Aunt Agatha, she once— But I pushed him away, and he never spoke to me again, and I’ve done my best not to look at a man since, or— or even think of touching one.” I begin scrubbing at my legs again, hard enough that I can see it scuffing and reddening under the harsh movements, and then, unable to stop my voice now it has begun, I go on, “But I want… They’re so beautiful. Men, I mean. I never really saw the appeal in a woman, Jeeves, I never understood it, All soft and dainty and whatnot, but even in their voices, the way they move, but… but _men_ , I…”

My breath catches in my mouth, and I inhale slightly before I add, “I see the other boys playing games sometimes, and they undress, and I see the sweat on their bodies and they glisten and I know it’s wrong of me to want to, Jeeves, but I want so desperately to reach out and to touch, and to feel how hot their skin is and how the muscle might move under their flesh and once I saw a friend of mine at university, his name was Godfrey, and he used to play the cello and I watched him play quite undressed and I saw the sweat gather on his neck and I imagined licking it and I hated myself so entirely, Jeeves, I never despised myself as much as I did in that moment, how like a beast I was, how ugly a thought it was that overtook me, that I should want to lick another man’s neck merely to taste him—” I heave in a gasp, for I have not breathed since I began the paragraph, and I shiver. “And I feel so dreadfully awful, Jeeves.”

“Sir,” Jeeves says, very slowly, “I have met very few men who lack the instinctive urge to be intimate with another. Your feelings are common to most men.”

“How can they be?” I ask wretchedly. “These are bestial urges, _bestial_.”

“Men are but beasts, sir,” Jeeves replies. “We, too, are of flesh and blood and bone; we, too, hunger and thirst and lust; we, too, are bestial. Whether on the battlefield or the bedroom, this fact remains the same.”

 “You’ve been to war, haven’t you, Jeeves?” I ask. My voice sounds thick in my ears.

“Yes, sir,” Jeeves says.

I dip my head beneath the water, and soak my head in the silence of it.

**Author's Note:**

> Hit me up [on Dreamwidth](https://dictionarywrites.dreamwidth.org/2287.html). Requests always open.
> 
> Please, please comment!


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